


When Everything Dies

by Sonora



Series: Blood, Titanium, and Midnight [2]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood Drinking, Bloodplay, Character Death, M/M, Partial Mind Control, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sexual Violence, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-02
Updated: 2013-12-02
Packaged: 2018-01-04 02:51:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1075662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sonora/pseuds/Sonora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Scissure hits Sydney, Herc and Chuck together make the decision to go into the PPDC.  Right from the start, though, it’s nothing but trouble.  Navigating a pseudo-military organization fighting the end of the world itself proves a hell of a lot more difficult than either one of them ever imagined it would be.  Especially, you know, considering that they’re vampires and all.</p><p>Or, the one where Herc’s an amoral dick, Chuck hates his Uncle Scott, Tamsin’s still dying, Stacker finds an alternate treatment for his cancer, and nobody fucking sparkles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Everything Dies

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [this magnificent piece of music](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-8L21tDmpo), if you’re in to the post-rock.
> 
> A big thanks to asreal01 for some awesome art. Check out her great stuff over on [Deviantart](http://asreal01.deviantart.com/) and her Hansencest on [Tumblr](http://kaijusizefeels.tumblr.com/).
> 
> My usual vampire!AU disclaimers apply - you know how I write, you know what you're getting. Twilight this is not.

Under harness, Chuck lets his mind wander. 

Savor the last few hours he’s got left. 

It won’t be like last time, this dying. No, last time he woke up in Herc’s arms, in Herc’s bed, with Herc’s fingers twined through his and a promise being whispered into his mouth.

...I shall always care for you, _a rúnsearc_...

Shit. Lies. Like everything else. Like everyone else. 

All these fucking years...

...I shall always care for you...

Bullshit.

Herc never...

And he thinks about Tamsin, his sire’s sire, dying in that hospital bed in Hawaii, a pale shade of a being, Herc and Stacker frantic to save her, unable to, in the end, to...

Fuck Herc.

Fuck him.

Fuck him and his little fucking show with the sling. Fuck him and his false goodbyes, his _drift with someone long enough and you feel like there’s nothing left to say._ Fuck him and his last attempt at the offer of blood, of the bond; too little, too late.

And as much as Chuck desperately wishes it was Herc in his mind right now instead of his little guard-dog, he doesn’t want his sire to feel what’s coming.

 _I know,_ he’d said, and fled.

Neither of them were ever good with words.

He’d left Herc a letter instead, written and folded and sealed exactly as the old man had taught him to do. 

Hopefully, that’ll be enough. 

It’s gonna have to be.

Data from LOCCENT is populating the battlespace HUD, Striker swaying under the rotors on her way to the Breach. Chuck’s very human co-pilot hasn’t spoken since leaving Hong Kong. Chuck hasn’t acknowledged the thralled pet in any way, not since that nauseating little speech on the hangar floor.

Why Herc hadn’t just let him die, and assumed command himself, Chuck’s got no idea. Not like his sire hasn’t commanded armies himself. But then, Stacker - like every other human in the PPDC - has always been Herc’s peculiar little obsession. 

Chuck’s never had much interest in making friends with the anchovies. Eating and fucking. That’s all their kind is good for - even the pretty ones, like the little Becket boy. Eating and fucking.

The only being under the stars Chuck gives a shit about is the one he can’t have anymore. 

Even if this wasn’t a suicide run.

But that brings a stab of genuine concern from Herc’s little guard dog, Stacker’s mind roiling with regret. “Master, I know you and I do not see eye to eye on many things, but Master...”

“I don’t give a shit what you think about Herc’n’me,” Chuck says, and only just manages to grab back the memory of the first time he saw Herc, himself still human, barely alive after being drug from the pit, his future sire watching him with an expression that Chuck has come to know was nothing but love. Back then. His father loved him back then. “I’m done with the old bastard.”

“Master...”

“Marshall,” he growls, twisting the thralled human’s title - it’s all but honorary at this point anyway, “I probably don’t need you to pilot Striker and Herc isn’t here to protect you. Shut your gob or I...”

But the dash chimes before he can move on to the really fun threats.

LOCCENT.

_Two minutes from the drop. Good luck._

He flips the switch on the main panel. 

“Striker Eureka copies, closing all ports, preparing to disengage transport,” he says, and takes a deep breath he doesn’t need.

The sooner this bullshit adventure with the PPDC is over, as far as he’s concerned, the better.

Biggest mistake of his fucking life.

This thing that started with a dead woman, over a decade before.

+++++

“I can’t just have both of you show up at the Academy as a drift pair. Imagine how that will look.”

“I’m not drifting with anyone who isn’t my son...”

“But that’s the problem. He is your son. You treat him like your son. He’s too young, physically, to be your brother or a cousin or something like that, and he’s too old to be anything else. You’d seen, what, your thirty-ninth summer, when I found you? How am I supposed to sell this to the PPDC?”

“ _Máistir_...”

“Caitlin and I are already having enough trouble with the humans, keeping them out of the deeper truths of this technology. She had turn D’onofrio to keep the jaeger from killing him.” It hung. “She doesn’t have the strength for such things like that. She almost died her final death during that test, childe.”

Herc rubbed a tired hand over his jaw, holding back his more choice retorts. It was his sire in front of him, after all, in a luxurious bar perched high over Waikiki, quiet and refined and not all suited to bloody conversation. 

Tamsim. The woman who gave him back his life, all those centuries ago; it was not his place to tell her she was wrong. 

Even when she was.

Even when she was trying to separate him from his childe.

Chuck, a product of a more egalitarian age, glowered under the display of authority and submission. To be expected, perhaps. He had never been subjected - whether through culture or by Herc’s hand - to the old power structures. Never had his sire demand his subservience on his knees under the noonday sun, whip woven from blessed ash bark in her hand, stripping the skin from his back as his body steamed. 

He had no such instincts as Herc does, to do as he was told by the master vampire in front of them, and he looked supremely displeased about it all.

Most of the time, Herc rather adored that quality in him. That defiance.

That night, it was fucking irritating.

 _Steady, childe,_ Herc ordered through the blood, making no show of hiding his own frustration.

Catching it, Chuck’s eyes flickered over to Tamsin.

“Oi, why can’t we go out there together?” he asked, almost plaintive.

Tamsin rolled her eyes. “Listen, little boy, I am doing everything I can to get this program functional. I love your father, I do, and I know what a pair you would make. But I cannot keep you two together, with your frozen youth, _mon bábóg_ , in the cockpit for any significant length of time. Not with the level of press attention we’re getting. The pairing would prove unsustainable.”

Chuck opened his mouth, a few choice insults roiling through their bounding blood, and Herc barely got in front of it. “ _Máistir_ , please...”

“Your ages are incompatible with any story I might invent for the PPDC overlords. And I cannot control the entire world’s media.” She shook her head. “One of you now, the second later.”

“What if we go in separate? No relation? No... obvious connections?”

She thought about that for a moment, short locks curled over her ears in the evening’s humidity, and Herc was reminded of how she first looked to him. A goddess, naked and painted blue for battle, covered in Roman blood, her red hair a fiery cloud against the smoke of the pyres. 

_Do you wish to go to the Bright Lands, my brave warrior? Or would you like to live long enough to vanquish your enemies and witness the Roman Empire crumble to dust?_

“That might work. But only barely. And I can’t guarantee you’ll still be teamed together. Drifting tech is based on our blood bonds, and Caitlin’s finding that it works better when one of the pair is a vampire. She might recommend we get two teams out of you, rather than one.” 

“This is bullshit, dad.”

Herc hadn’t had a physical headache in eighteen centuries, but if he had still been capable of getting one... “Chuck, you will not speak that way to...”

“Right, she’s your sire, and you’re mine.”

“And as mine, you should...” 

“I don’t want anybody else in my head!” Chuck snapped, and between the volume and the Gaelic, a few heads turned in their direction.

Tamsin grabbed his arm, then, long fingernails digging into his flesh, blood welling up around. 

“I am not just trying to protect the humans, little boy, but _us_ ,” she growled, throaty and deep, as only a master vampire could manage. “What becomes of us, when we win, when the humans realize they haven’t exterminated all the monsters? I am not saving the humans at the risk of damning our own kind. If you are willing...”

“Tamsin!” somebody called, and Herc’s sire lounged back in her chair, a warning on her face and a threat in her aura.

The interloper was, at first sight, perfect.

Dark, gorgeous, hair shaved to military regs and clothing perfectly in order. A very smooth boarding-school accent polishing over a rough working-class background, mere hints in his voice. Rage in his blood and control stamped across his face.

Unclaimed. Unthralled. Even by Tamsin.

And Herc felt his fangs dropping of their own accord.

There were good reasons, he found himself thinking, he’d found himself drawn to the military over the course of his long life. Such delicious men could be found in those ranks.

Chuck glared at him, catching the faint scent of his arousal, the spike of interest heating his blood, and Herc smiled blandly back, before looking up at Stacker, smile changing.

“And who might this delightful individual be?” he asked, pushing the sharp hunting teeth back up into his gums with his tongue.

“Stacker,” Tamsin acknowledged, ignoring her childe but not quite offering the human interloper a chair. “Didn’t expect to see you here tonight, lad.”

The human, Stacker, went for the open seat anyway, last one at the table, looking very uneasy. “Who’re your friends?” he asked, accent thick with the back alleys of Manchester, and Herc’s irritation changed into curious desire. That voice... so much pain... 

“Herc, and Chuck, late of Sydney, looking to do some damage after Scissure did to their hometown,” she didn’t quite answer. “They want to be Rangers.”

Stacker nodded, and then stiffened, anxiety spiking his blood bitter in Herc’s nostrils. “They’re like you.”

Her smile went positively predatory. “Yes, darling. They’re like me.”

The human closed his eyes, rubbed his forehead, sighed. “Must we?”

“Takes monsters to fight monsters, Stacker. This is how we do it,” she replied softly, and touched a dark cheek, eyes still very much on Herc and Chuck. “If you want him tonight, Fearadhach,” she added to Herc, in their old tongue, with his old name, “you bring him back to me.”

“I hear you and obey, milady,” he replied, in the way she had once taught him.

She kissed his head on the way out.

Chuck smiled wide at Stacker, his hunger overriding his irritation, just as it always did, and Herc was torn between ordering the kid back to their room, or ordering Stacker. “You know us, human?”

His visage was brave but his blood was scared, aroused, tormented. “I do.”

“Not yet you don’t,” Chuck said, and twined his fingers through the human’s, pulling them both to their feet, pressing his lips to the now-racing pulse of the human’s wrist. “But you could, Mister Pentecost. Right, dad?”

He smelled of fire, of death and loss, of a yearning for the light, of violence and hope, and Herc figured, why the hell not? 

Stacker looked like he could take it. Like he could use it.

And he did. Everything they dished out. All night. Until he was streaked with his own blood, sweating and shivering at the same time, begging to come again, despite the fact his body had already given up all it could manage. Lost in the pleasure-pain of it all.

Beautiful sight.

Hadn’t been the first time he and Chuck had a threesome. But it had been a while - decades - since they’d had the same human a second time. Herc normally let Chuck drain their partner dry. Easier than explaining things, and more fun too. A few - a very rare few - they had kept. 

But there was some deep connection to Tamsin that both Herc and Chuck could taste in his blood. And there was strength in this one, determination, that was needed. Alive. As human. For the human side of the war.

 _Shame_ , Herc mused, and wondered if it wasn’t time to get his boy another pet.

The war wouldn’t go on forever, now would it?

Tamsin summoned him to the beach before dawn, the last light of the dying moon dancing across the waves, Stacker sleeping peacefully upstairs and Chuck sent for orange juice.

“If you want it still, if you can accept my terms, I could use you. The whole world could use you.”

He knelt in front of his sire, kissed her hand, swore an oath to her, sealed in blood.

She was so strong, so powerful. One of the oldest living of their kind. A goddess, made flesh.

But years later, Herc would visit her, dying in hospital.

Years later, the whole world would be twisted beyond repair.

If he’d known, he would have spent the gray-tropic dawn next to Chuck, content, his son’s body warm and cock hard with Stacker’s blood. Forgone his sire, his oaths, the war. Stayed with what he valued above all else.

If he’d but known.

+++++

Jaeger Academy was easy. Ridiculously so.

At least, with training held mostly during the day, at least there was some daylight to help the vampires weaken their reflexes, allow skin to bruise and muscle to ache, to eat when food was offered. Herc had no real memory of what food tasted like, back when it was a necessity and not an annoyance, but Chuck, who still retained some sense of it, said it was all shit.

 _Don’t need it, sire,_ his mind whispered to Herc’s in the darkness, when Herc pushed out into their bond, inquiring. _Just gotta get through it._

Hunting - true feeding - was the biggest challenge, trying work between the security cameras and the training schedule for a mouthful or two of blood. Chuck, though, developed a knack for fetching supper, coming to Herc unerringly whenever their human training partners were asleep.

Wouldn’t say anything. Just press himself full-body to Herc and let his head drop to the side. Neck exposed. Everything offered. And Herc would feed on his son’s blood, the flavor of whatever human he’d taken it from paling in comparison to the ownership Herc tasted there.

His boy. His childe. _His_.

“You know we’ll be compatible,” he whispered in his hair, four months in, the night after the physical training ended, before the drift trials began. The rest of the barracks hypno’ed asleep, the dark hours claimed by the rightful owners. 

Their training uniforms bore different last names, their files different stories. Hercules Hansen was a decorated RAAF veteran - conveniently from a unit that had been wiped out in the blast - with a wife, children lost to Scissure’s attack. Charles Gerhardt was an orphan, no family, no friends, signed up after dropping his scholarship and his last year of uni. 

No indication at all of who they were to each other. 

No reason for anyone other than Caitlin - who was fighting now, with her own childe - to know of any logical connection between them.

They wouldn’t be given special consideration.

They’d have to do it on their own.

“We fight like each other.”

“We fight dirty,” Chuck laughed into his chest. 

Herc kissed his hair. “That’s what I mean, son. You and I. Two of a kind. Our own little circle. You’re mine. I’ll never let you be anyone else’s.”

Chuck snuggled closer, those wicked green eyes of his - so much brighter and so much darker, since Herc had turned him - gleaming in the Alaskan darkness. “ _Athair_ ,” he whispered, his tongue making the Gaelic Herc had taught it sing. “Our jaeger will best the best in the world.”

“Of course it will. You’ve a brilliant mind for machinery, _a rúnsearc_.”

“And you are a warrior.” The admiration in his voice was Herc’s entire world.

“You are as well,” Herc said, and hugged his childe closer, tipping that young chin up for a kiss, letting every ounce of his pride and love and affection he felt pour into their bond.

But the next morning, when Herc reported down to the fighting floor - the Kwoon, whoever the fuck had come up with that stupid name - they weren’t scheduled together for the trials, as Caitlin was supposed to have arranged. 

Chuck, in fact, was nowhere to be seen.

His childe’s low-level anger grumbled along their blood, and Herc barely had time to shoot him a _be patient!_ , before his own name was being called and somebody was handing him a staff and it was too late.

Five rounds he went - his hunting instincts scenting weaknesses, whispering to him how best to hypno them, how to give them what they needed so he could take what he required for himself - without losing himself in the blood. Five rounds, thinking he would be able to slip away and go fetch his boy and bring him down and make sure, make sure these motherfuckers knew...

And then there he was.

Scott Hansen.

Beautiful, dangerous, ginger Scott Hansen. Recycled from the previous training class, Scott Hansen, for drift incompatibility. _We think this pairing has potential, Herc,_ Scott Hansen. 

Herc had never seen him before, but his scent was almost familiar. So much like Chuck’s had been, when he was still human. So familiar. So violent. So welcoming of the darkness clawing its way into his soul. 

Scott, smiling at him, letting the staff fall away from him, open palms outstretched in invitation.

“Let’s see what you got, other Hansen,” he laughed.

Herc smiled back.

Forgot about Chuck until five minutes into the fight, when it was 3-3 and he had Scott in a blood choke and the human was all but twitching, refusing to tap.

Scott finally went limp as his sense of _Chuck_ came roaring back.

And Herc didn’t care what anybody might say about i; he just started running

+++++

Herc wasn’t with him, when they told him he wasn’t going to be a pilot.

Herc wasn’t with him, when they downgraded him to an enlisted technician.

But Herc was there with him, to witness the aftermath.

The old Celtic vampire thought it spoke highly of his self control that he didn’t go tear out the throats of every human on Kodiak Island who’d reduced his precious childe to what he found in the barracks.

Chuck was attacking the wall, one of the metal bunk beds torn clean apart, parts of it driven clean through the shattered cinderblock. Snow was swirling in, eddies from the cloudy afternoon freezing Chuck’s blood to his torn skin.

Herc was on him in a flash, reacting before he could think, yanking his childe back from the ruin of the wall and backward, down onto the floor. Chuck bared his fangs, hissing and snapping, but Herc just forced his weight down on the boy’s chest and jammed the vee of his hand cruel-hard into the underside of his jaw, jerking his head sharply up.

Shaking him.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” he growled.

And too late, Herc realized the blood on Chuck’s face wasn’t from injury, but tears.

“They say... they said my neural pathways are too unstable, the scans all wrong,” Chuck said, his voice somewhere between accusation and grief. “Which of course they fucking would be, wouldn’t they, old man?” 

“Chuck...”

“Because of fucking you!” he snapped, and squirmed uselessly under Herc’s knees. “You’re the one who always hypnos the humans, you’re the one who insists on being the only person, the only person, who ever fucks me! How the fuck was I supposed to be able to drift, make a connection, with anyone fucking here?!”

“ _A rúnsearc_...”

“Don’t call me that!” he snarled, and shoved Herc off with surprising strength, scrambling back. “Don’t fucking call me that! You don’t care! You and your brood sister and that fucking bitch sire of yours...”

Herc, despite his concern for his childe, felt something sour in him at the mention of his sire’s name, and back-handed the boy, Chuck’s skull cracking the floor from the force of it. “You leave Tamsin out of this, boy!” 

Chuck’s eyes flashed from the ground, pale and dangerous, even as he clutched at the reddened skin of his cheek.

“Yeah, _boy_ , because that’s all I am to you! Some cute piece of arse you hungered for, nothing more than a stupid kid who couldn’t say no to some pathetic, lonely, mind-raping, blood-sucking, son of a bitch!”

And at that, Herc grabbed his boy. Furious. By the hair. Yanking him back. Hard. Enough to force his eyes open, watch the truth in them.

“You wanted this!”

“You wanted this!” Chuck gritted back, pure venom in his words. “I just wanted somebody to look at me like I was worth something!”

For a moment, Herc didn’t say anything, the sound of Chuck’s heart beating slowly with rage, the only noise in the room.

Thinking about the boy he’d found in that underground pit, dying in the filth of an Australian prison colony, the despair that had been building in his heart, the longing for something more, for meaning, for family, for love... love Herc had always done his damnedest to show... his only childe, the only childe he’d ever made, only childe he’d ever wanted, only son he’d had since...

“Do _not_ lie to me about this, childe!”

Chuck’s fangs cut bloody streaks across his lips as he spat back, “fuck you, _sire_!”

The last of Herc’s self-control crumbled.

Instinct roared over better sense. 

And he hurtled Chuck face-first into the busted-up wall. 

His childe barely had time to catch himself before Herc was on him, ripping his clothes off, tearing the flesh of that young shoulder with his ancient fangs, and the world dissolved in that old berserker haze.

Chuck - Herc noticed dimly, and from very far away - didn’t even try to stop him.

The room was ruined by the time Herc finally surfaced again, every piece of furniture broken, splattered with thick, dark, bloody seed, sheets torn off twisted mattresses and synthetic foam everywhere.

They were entwined together in that mess, naked, clothes beyond salvation, and Chuck was panting for air his body didn’t need, half-conscious, floating near the edge of delirium from the blood loss.

Regret was thrumming through the boy’s mind. Regret, regret, regret. Regret, roiling between them, through the blood they shared. And at the scent of it, Herc sighed, and began to search out the worst of his boy’s wounds to lick shut, a fresh spike of anxiety hitting him with every taste. 

_fathermyFATHER, nobodytouchesmyfather but me, no nonono, wanna stay, dad, _athair, ...__

__You are my world, tá mo chroí istigh ionat,_ Herc thought, letting the old affections flow out from him, the same ones he used to use to sing Chuck to sleep, back when he was new-made and scared of the sunlight. _A chuisle mo chroí, moon in my night..._ _

“Dad,” Chuck croaked at that, blinking up at him in a haze of pain, hand reaching out with torn nails. “Dad...”

The older vampire pressed his lips to the younger’s fingertips. “My childe,” Herc murmured, and sealed up the still-oozing gashes across his knuckles. “My beautiful, dark, darling son.” 

Chuck’s body collapsed at that, falling heavily into Herc’s embrace, weak as if new-made again, and when he spoke again, he was practically sobbing. “They said I can still be a technician, if I’d like.” Fresh tears threatened red and thick in the corners of his eyes.

Thumbing the droplets away, Herc shook his head. “We don’t have to sta...”

Chuck shook his head, and touched Herc’s cheek with weak fingers. “This way, I can work on your jaeger, stay close. They’re... they’re brilliant machines. I’d love the chance to crawl around in one.” He cuddled closer, like he was only a few nights old again, new to the blood, nothing but instinct, emotion. Something to protect and cherish and love, not punish. “Fantastic machines.”

_Keep him safe from this grief, or make him happy?_ There was no way to win that, Herc knew, but... 

_...that’s all I am to you..._

If his boy wanted...

Swallowing the bitterness in his throat, Herc wrapped himself protectively against Chuck’s shaking body, biting his palm as he spoke. “You always were good with machines. The best. You’ll do our blood proud.”

“Dad...”

_We’ll outlast them, son. We’ll outlast them all,” Herc promised silently, willing the words along the bond, and held up his hand, cupped to hold his welling lifeblood. “No worries," was all he said._

Chuck looked at him with wary eyes, and then back down at the offer of sire’s blood.

A rare treat, in their little family. Herc had done his best, not to spoil his son, keeping that as a reward or a show of affection, a way to show his love and pride without having to resort to words. He’d moved through almost two dozen languages in his long life, and he had never had a silvered tongue in the first place; declarations of any sort were awkward.

The bond, their bond, shared through blood and closeness and desire, had always been strong enough to overcome his failings there.

Or so Herc believed. But as Chuck dipped and latched and suckled, as Herc held him as carefully as he had when he was new-made, he felt none of their usual connection.

No bond. No thoughts. A careful blanket of snow over Chuck’s mind, as cold and white and fathomless as that falling outside.

It was... unusual. Wrong. 

Herc didn’t push his way back inside the walls of his son’s mind, though, forge a path back into the warmth of his soul. Humans were for thralling, enslaving, not vampires. And certainly not childer.

He was not going to deny the boy the choice of privacy, just to satisfy himself. 

But Chuck had never locked him out before, and Herc didn’t know what it meant, that he did now.

They packed Chuck’s things together, after the boy felt strong enough to stand; the things he had to take, what the PPDC had issued him. Everything real of theirs, their odds and ends of furniture and paintings and war trophies and other flotsam they’d collected over the years was back home, in the bush, in their place that was theirs alone, their timeless refuge against the ticking clocks of human civilization. 

"We’ll return there, when this is over,” Herc promised him as they worked. “We’ll have ourselves a party in Sydney, take a few treats back with us, make love under the stars.”

"Yeah,” Chuck agreed, the word heavy, grudging. “Yeah."

Herc fed on him one final time, sent out the tendrils of their blood bond to his childe, pushing at him, entreating him, asking him to open his mind and his heart to his sire again.

Chuck didn’t.

He left that afternoon, for the proving grounds, for tech school.

Herc didn’t see his childe again for six months.

+++++

“What’s the problem?”

“He can’t just go around threatening our scientists with... with what was it? A stake?”

"Yes, little human boy, it was a stake. A simple squabble, nothing to be concerned with. Correct?" 

Tamsin closed her eyes without answering, the slow-burning fire in her pupils shining through the lids. She’d been laid up in hospital in Hawaii for the past three months, too sick to make the trip out to Hong Kong to see her oldest childe, some strange malaise overtaking her body since the Onibaba incident.

“I thought the sunlight and wood kills your kind!”

Herc rolled his eyes - as if he would tell some fucking human that only blessed wood, from a pew or a sacred tree, could issue their kind final death. Chuck, from what he’d read in the report, had used a couple of regular old pine branches on Lightcap. And the Arctic springtime sun wasn’t nearly enough to kill a vampire as young as his brood-sister; the older a vampire was, the more susceptible he or she was to sunlight. 

What Chuck did? Nothing life-threatening, hardly even worth commenting on.

Just a friendly family squabble.

And if threatening his auntie made him feel better about her failure to fix his orders up, Herc was of the opinion that Chuck should be allowed to do it. 

"Tamsin, ma'am..."

“This is my problem, Stacker, an argument between my grandchilde and his brood-aunt,” Tamsin finally replied, and fixed her gaze on Herc. “I assume you know why he did it, childe mine?”

Herc sighed. He’d seen the orders in the assignment system, tried to phone Chuck a few times to talk to him about it, but for a Ranger to be calling the schoolhouse about some corporal in the maintenance track... he hadn’t gotten very far. Fucking humans and their fucking inconveniences. But it was all he had to work with, their bond quiet. “He wasn’t assigned to Lucky’s crew.”

Tamsin picked at an invisible spec of dust on her thin blanket. The room was dark, quiet, shielded against the Hawaiian sun with thick black-out curtains, with only a small bank of candles for light. An IV bag had been set up for her, ruby red and smelling of sterilization. She seemed very small in it, her normally towering presence reduced to almost nothing, circuitry lines burned into her skin that should have long healed.

“Stacker, I’ve seen to it that the PPDC is handing you command. Next week. This is the first issue you will fix. Do you understand me?”

The human flinched in the flickering light, but nodded. “Yes, Tamsin, I understand.”

“Good boy,” she replied gently, and waved him away. “Go now. Both of you.”

“Sire,” Herc said, hesitating; if she was sick, if he could offer her a vein...

“Both of you, out!”

“Reactor leak in Coyote,” Stacker explained, in the hallway, eyes a little unfocused, words regretful. New circuitry suit scars snaked out from beneath the short sleeves of his tee-shirt. “Three hour fight. I... I passed out, she finished it alone.”

“And?”

Stacker rubbed a hand over his face; Herc could all but smell his weariness, an instinctive prey-fear he was trying desperately to suppress. 

“And this, Herc. Neither of us will ever pilot again.” The human sighed. “I’m out of the conn-pod. She’s... she’s hiding the medical report. It’s...”

“But you’re taking over as Marshall?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re loyal to our blood?” 

Stacker looked at him then, confused. “I... I-I don’t understand?”

 _The fuck do you think I mean?_ Herc wanted to say, but held himself back. If Tamsin was out of commission for however long, that left him as the ranking vampire in the PPDC, and he wasn’t about to leave the defense of the planet solely in the hands of little children, playing soldier.

But saying that to a man such as Stacker Pentecost would only serve to piss him off. 

Herc ran a hand down those fresh scars instead, tracing them with his fingertips, allowing his nails to scrap along the damaged skin. 

“Beautiful, these,” he murmured. “A good warrior always has scars.” That fearful scent was thick now, heady, delicious. “But a good warrior fights not for himself, but for his liege, his masters, his _betters_.” He twined his fingers through Stacker’s, and brought the human’s hand to his mouth, turning it, scraping his fangs across the hammering pulse. “If he does not fight for them, out of the love he feels for them, he fights for them out of fear, as a slave. Would you like to be a slave, Stacker Pentecost?”

The humans blanched. “Herc, you know... Tamsin means everything to me, I would never...”

“My boy comes to Hong Kong, my squadron, my supervision,” Herc said, and laid a hand on Stacker’s cheek. “Only way I can guarantee his continued good behavior.”

Stacker didn’t say anything in return, but a hot spike of need flooded Herc’s nostrils, and the vampire smirked.

“Come, boy,” he said, tightening his hand around Stacker’s, giving him no space in which to say no. “The lord always rewards those who are loyal to him.”

That living scent turned all to shame. And arousal. And confusion.

Delicious.

And by the time Herc finished with the new human Marshall, left him a sobbing wreck in some nameless hotel bed, Chuck’s orders had been corrected and were sitting in his smart phone’s inbox. 

_Hong Kong Shatterdome. 581st Maintenance Squadron, Alpha Flight._

Tamsin forbade him to attend the graduation ceremonies, though. _How will that look, a Ranger showing up for that?_ she asked him when he inquired, in a tone that brooked no disobedience.

Chuck arrived in Hong Kong a week later.

And Scott Hansen almost got his Vic arse drained dry.

The first time around.

+++++

Scott Hansen was a problem. Had been from the first moment Herc laid eyes on him, sparred with him.

They were good together; Herc couldn’t deny that. A matched set, like a team of carriage horses of old, from some nobleman’s estate. Physically equals in size and weight and appearance, if not stamina and speed. It mattered little; Scott drifted well with Herc, eagerly splitting his mind open for the slightest scrap of attention, and they fought well together in Lucky. 

And Scott Hansen was delicious. Undeniably delicious. Loyal. As attentive and happy as a well-trained dog, Herc found him to be, and just the thing for warming his bunk in the cold of the Shatterdome. A balm, Scott Hansen was, against the months without his childe.

Somewhere along the way, the PPDC had decided the two of them were related, despite the fact their official dossiers put their birth cities in different states, their histories in different cities. Siblings, the PPDC decided. PR put out lots of propaganda with the two of them looking brotherly. Touching. Walking together. Working on Lucky. That sort of thing. Herc didn’t mind - it offered him another layer of protection against the truth, and Scott was only too happy to play the role.

Still, Scott Hansen was no replacement for Chuck.

Something Herc had made damn clear from the very first. 

The old vampire had experience - considerable experience - in hiding what he was from humans. Letting them see bits and pieces only, making them believe whatever he wanted them to believe. But the drift was different, or so Caitlin had said, and so Herc had taken action, the night before their first simulator ride.

Taken his irritating co-pilot into a room with a door he could lock and fucked him. Violently. Without asking, without offering. Just shoved him into a wall and overwhelmed him and ripped his clothes off, penetrating him with fangs and cock at the same time, blood welling, dripping, spilling, decadent and sweet.

“This is what I am, Scott,” he’d growled in his ear, slamming into him, Scott’s own blood making him harder by the second. “This is what you will find in the drift with me, and this is what we’re going to do about it. You wanna pilot with me, this is the price. You understand?”

Scott had groaned, shuddered, stared at him with disbelieving eyes. “You’re... you’re a vampire?”

“Well, get the anchovy a cookie,” Herc had growled, and ripped a fresh hole in his neck. 

Scott started laughing. Manic. Desperate. Terrified.

Herc didn’t stop until the floor was slippery.

Scott had looked wrecked when Herc finally pulled out, a hazy confusion overtaking his better senses.

“You... Herc... that was...”

“Shut your gob, boy,” the vampire ordered, still irritated, and licked the wounds shut, ran rough fingers around inside the human’s battered hole to heal the damage. Dragged his new drift partner and co-pilot back to his bunk. 

Thrown him in and told him to stay there.

Went out on a hunt, wishing Chuck was there with him, whining about wanting the first bite, cuddling in after they were done, warm and hard and needy.

Herc had spent months fucking Scott, waiting for his childe to come back to him. Fucked him. Often. Hard. Viciously.

It was almost impossible to not hurt him during sex. The man was gorgeous, his blood tainted with so many of the same things Herc had once tasted in Chuck. And sometimes the old vampire felt the need to smear blood across Scott’s face, just to see what would happen. How it would bring out the green in his eyes. If he would lick it off or run away in fear.

Be interesting, at least. 

Scott was an interesting human. Just as infuriating, just as angry, just as...

Well, not as beautiful as Chuck. Nothing - no human, no vampire - could ever truly compare to Chuck. Nothing.

And Herc’s blood sang in happiness when his boy walked into his ‘dome for the first time, kit bag on his shoulders and non-issue ballcap pulled down against the daylight, striding across the sunny helipad towards the Hong Kong Shatterdome doors. One of a group of a dozen new techs, but the only one Herc gave a shit about.

His boy’s eyes met his, out of that little knot of newcomers. Met his, and then flicked over to Scott, narrowing ever so slightly; he had to have caught it, Herc realized, too late. The human boy smelled of vampire. Of feeding. Of bruising. Of Herc’s hands and fangs, tearing into his flesh. Herc’s darkness, burrowing into his soul.

Herc gave him a look, tried to whisper a thread of reassurance to his childe. But their bond was silent. Dead. Not even a murmur, a wisp of breeze, able to carry over the chasm that lay between them.

Too much time drifting with Scott, maybe. Drinking from Scott. Too little time with Chuck.

And Chuck looked away, face flushing in a way that he only did when he was thoroughly humiliated.

Herc only just stopped the groan that wanted to escape him.

_By the gods..._

“Umm, Ranger Hansen?” Scott asked, clearing his throat. “You wanna...”

 _I’ll handle that tonight,_ Herc promised himself, grim.

“G’day, pleasure to meet you all,” he began as the new group of techs fanned out around him, glancing around but making eye contact with none of them - that sort of thing could be difficult, for humans. Like getting stared down by a jaguar. And Herc, right then, didn’t trust himself to keep his more vicious instincts locked away. “You better all be ready to work.”

Scott shot him a curious look, but stepped in. “Welcome to the Lucky Seven crew. We work hard here, play hard. I’m sure you’ve all read the gossip rags. Most of that shit is true, but Herc here runs a tight ship. We expect nothing but the best from you...”

Chuck was still staring at him.

Herc looked away.

Boy came by that night, though. Barged straight in to Herc’s room.

Right in the middle of his nightly ritual with Scott.

Herc had always believed in the importance of discipline with boys, but there were old traditions he’d never bothered following. He wasn’t overly fond of ceremony - one of the reasons Herc had found Australia so refreshing, after all those centuries spent wandering Europe. So he hadn’t been too keen on observing all the proper etiquette with Scott.

But, at the flash of horror on Chuck’s face - standing there in the open doorway, staring at the two of them, entwined, Herc’s fangs just barely scraping the skin of Scott’s neck, Herc’s cock hard in his issue trousers - Herc realized that might have been a mistake.

Not that he was about to admit that to his childe. 

Herc loved Chuck, he did, but Chuck was his, and Scott was his, and he had any degree of mastery over them that he so chose, and it wasn’t Chuck’s _place_ to question...

“Dad?” Chuck asked in a strangled voice, and any desire Herc had to take his mounting temper out on the boy evaporated.

“Close the door,” he snapped instead, and let go of Scott, moving back, crossing his arms. “Can’t have one of my corporals sneaking around the pilot dorms, can I?”

“Fuck you, old man,” Chuck snarled, but kicked the door shut anyway, prowling towards Scott with deliberate slowness. “Why isn’t he on his knees?” he added in Gaelic.

“Not a shred of respect for you sire?” Herc countered in kind.

“What of my sire’s for me? He reeks of you.”

“He’s a human, tasty and meaningless,” Herc said, and thought of something. “You remember our little Max?”

Chuck bared his fangs in an open-mouthed grin that spoke of nothing but anger. “Max was a sweet boy who behaved himself like a good little pet ought. This one’s a sack of kaijuu shit.”

Herc sighed. He’d thought the reminder would be good - pleasant memories, those. Their soldier, the one they’d ensnared in post-War France, back in the day. GI, deserter, found on a hunt one night in Paris. Blond, blue-eyed, the very definition of all-American. Normally, Herc had no tolerance for a man who ran from the front, but Chuck had fallen in love with the boy’s weary eyes and broken heart, and so Herc had brought him back to their flat. Instead of draining him dry in the alley where they’d found him. Thralled him. Collared him. 

Nearly ten years they’d kept their little Max, virgin but for them, body frozen in time by the power of their blood, his words sweet and hands soft under Herc’s gentle control, the taste of him an absolute treasure. The perfect pet, until Chuck had bored of him and Herc broke the thrall and the ageless little human threw himself out a window.

“Is it because he’s not blond?” 

“It’s because he thinks himself good enough to touch you like you’re equals,” Chuck growled. 

Catching the confusion in Scott’s eyes, Herc reached out a hand to Chuck, drew him in and wrapped an arm around his waist. 

“There’s a difference between training a lap-dog and a hound for the hunt,” Herc murmured, in English once again, into Chuck’s mouth. Loud enough for Scott to hear. “You don’t break one like you do the other.”

“He should be on his knees when he presents his blood to you,” Chuck whispered back, heat in his cheeks and possessiveness in his voice. “Like a good human. Give you the respect a master vampire such as you deserves.”

“Mmm, is that so?” Herc murmured, forgetting about Scott entirely, the press of his childe’s body against his own a pleasure too-long denied to him. He dug his nails into the soft skin above Chuck’s hips, above the cheap jeans hugging him in all the right ways. “Would you like to do the honors, then, my boy?”

“I’d like to drain him for his lack of regard.”

“Oi,” Scott demanded, piping up at the worst possible moment - another quality him and Chuck had in common, “the fuck is this wanker, Herc? I thought we had...”

Herc didn’t have time to even groan, before Chuck was on the human, hands knotting up in the collar of his zoom bag, slamming him back into the wall. “Finish that sentence, human, and I’ll fucking gut you, I don’t care what the PPDC thinks about the publicity nightmare it would create.”

“H-Herc...” 

And Chuck wrenched his fist, choking him with his own collar.

“Don’t you look at him, you look at me,” Chuck growled, and jerked the human’s head back, scraping the skin of his throat with blunt teeth. “Let me tell you where your place is in things, little boy. You’re here so Herc can be. You’re here so Herc can pilot, so Herc can kill kaijuu. You are meat in that machine, nothing more. You are nothing to him. In a century, you will be dust, and he will still be here. He will forget about you. Like you never existed.”

For the first time since Herc had known the brash, arrogant man, Scott actually looked scared. “Who are you?” he whispered.

Herc could smell Chuck’s confusion, but the bond was too weak for him to offer up the answer. He hadn’t told his co-pilot about his son. Hadn’t let him see it in the drift - he’d had centuries of experience in keeping humans out, letting them see only what he wanted them to see.

And Chuck was his. _His_. Herc had no intention of sharing those memories with Scott.

But judging from the little encounter taking place in front of him, he probably should have warned them both. Another fucking mistake.

Motherfucker.

“Something you’ll never be, fucker,” he spat, turning back to Herc, "I don’t like him, father,” added again in Gaelic.

“It’s not about what you like, son,” Herc replied wearily in kind, tired of this game already, wanting nothing more than to watch his boy on the hunt once again, and taste the hot victory pumping through his immutable veins.

Chuck’s lip curled. “Never has been, has it?” 

“He’s meat,” he said with as much finality as he could manage, and rolled his eyes. “What do you feel like tonight? Hong Kong is very international.”

Chuck made a little show of sizing up the human squirming beneath his hand. “Oh, I’d say some Australian cuisine sounds good. Haven’t had any home cooking in a long time.”

“Sounds good,” and Herc patted Scott’s cheek. “What’s the name of that ex-pat club you love so much, little brother?”

Scott blanched.

An hour later, Chuck was cutting a tall, blond, very Australian boy out of the herd of jaeger flies buzzing around the bar Scott recommended. Pretty, that one, prettier than Scott, and while Herc really wasn’t hungry enough to justify drinking deep enough to kill, he had to admit, it felt godsdamn good to smear gore over his childe’s face again. Let Chuck suck the bright arterial blood off his fingers. Fuck him senseless as the dying human watched, his moans of despair sweeter than any music.

Felt like old times.

As if nothing at all had changed.

“Graduated top of my class,” Chuck said, much later that night, staring up at the stars from the top of the main hangar, settled into the vee of Herc’s legs. Both of them were bloodstained, sticky, clothes ruined and long showers in order, but Herc felt wonderful. _Chuck_ felt wonderful. “Instructors said I had the best mind for mechanics they’d ever seen.”

“Course you do,” Herc replied, brushed his hair from his forehead, offering him a bleeding hand. “You always have.”

Blood. Sire’s blood. To reestablish their connection.

Their bond.

But Chuck - for the first time in his life - pushed in away, his mind closed, distant.

“I want to fuck Scott,” he said instead.

Herc sighed and drew his hand back to himself, sealing the cut, holding in his disappointment. “You want to drain Scott.”

“Same thing.”

“We’re not ripping him apart, Chuck.”

“Why not?”

 _Yeah, why not?_ Boy'd be so beautiful, shredded to nothing. “He’s my co-pilot.”

“I’m your childe.” Chuck nuzzled the inside of his father’s knee sleepily, fangs still half out. “Me.” 

Herc smiled fondly, remembering how cuddly Chuck had been those first few years, before, just like any growing boy, he’d gotten the idea into his stubborn mind that familial affection equated to weakness. He wrapped his arms tighter around his boy’s shoulders, kissing his hair.

“Yes you are, darling,” he promised. “Always.”

+++++

Scott ended bloody.

Scott was always going to end bloody.

Vampires or no.

There was something rotten inside of him. Rotten, beyond what even Herc could accept. There was a difference between darkness and decay, and Scott Hansen, fat on a diet of celebrity and hunting and drifting with a vampire, slowly began tipping that scale in the wrong direction.

Chuck hated the man, and Chuck always seemed to know, the nights when Herc touched Scott instead of him, bit Scott instead of him. Invariably, his eyes would find Herc’s the next day, fae, fey green peeking out from under the rim of the ball cap he always wore, accusatory and hard.

 _He is where you should be,_ Herc always tried to say.

Chuck wasn’t listening any longer.

Things deteriorated. 

At first, Chuck came by quite often; staking his claim in front of Scott, or whinging about wanting to go hunt, when shifts lined up or it was the time of day not many people were in the halls, and Chuck could sneak up to Herc’s quarter. Fucked up on the roof sometimes, when they could. Went out, and found themselves dinner - just a sip, or a kill, whichever suited.

But Herc’s face was all over the international news and paparazzi were everywhere and he outranked Chuck by several orders of measure. Wasn’t safe for him to go gallivanting about the city, killing humans in back alleys or engaging in midnight liaisons with some boy on his crew. 

At least, that was the way Chuck put it, one night when he hadn’t shown up at Herc’s door in over a week, and Herc risked the trip down to the bachelor NCO quarters.

“They’ll take Lucky from you,” his boy said, door half open and uniform half-on.

Herc growled - as if he cared about that fucking machine. “Come with me tonight.”

“I have shift, old man.”

“Come...”

“Shift.”

Herc didn’t touch him again that for almost six months, after Lucky’s fourth deployment. 

After Lucky's fourth kill. When Herc needed things that Scott’s fragile human body couldn’t provide.

His childe asked permission to go before Herc could even lick his flayed skin back together. And even as he'd bitten back every moan, every scream, he pulled his clothes on over still-oozing wounds and left limping. But he still came. Came every time Herc called for him. Sire's right. Childe's duty.

If Chuck wanted to be a shit the rest of the time, Herc figured, let him.

But by the summer of 2018, they only spoke when Chuck had to report a maintenance issue - eyes dull and words flat. Herc had no idea how often the boy was feeding, but when he tried to ask about it, Chuck stormed out.

Lucky Seven had replaced their relationship, the link in their family chain, and by the time Herc recognized that Chuck wasn’t just in some _mood_ , it was too late; he had no idea what to do.

His boy had thrown himself into his job with an intensity the other techs sometimes described to Herc as _frightening_. He’d go for days without sleep, they’d say - not that he needed it, but the humans didn’t know that - working to get a minute piece of Lucky’s tertiary left actuators working, or perfecting the angle adjusters on her canons. Became obsessed with making her perfect. Didn’t win him many friends among the crew, but there was a kind of grudging respect that developed. 

Herc was proud of him, in that way that all sires were proud are their childer’s accomplishments and dedication, but it didn’t mean he missed his boy any less.

Didn’t mean he didn’t still reach out for him in his sleep, and recoil at finding Scott’s beating heart instead of Chuck’s soothing stillness.

Two hundred years of his childe in his arms, gone.

Fucking war.

Chuck’s mind had sealed off, what was once so loud between them fell to hardly a whisper, their bond a mausoleum to their life before the fucking kaijuu. The distance between them could have been measured in mere footsteps, but Herc had never felt so far from his childe.

He wanted to ask Tamsin - beg her - to help him get his Chuck back. But she was in and out of hospital constantly, and Caitlin was unreachable, and the few other vampires in the program were leery of the attention Herc’s Ranger status drew, or too scared of Tamsin, to be of much help. Herc was alone with it, and he had no idea what to do.

So Herc trained, and killed kaijuu, and fucked Scott, and tried to give Chuck the room he needed, and the years slipped by. Accelerating, it seemed to him sometimes, faster and faster. The older he got, the harder it was to hold onto anything, time becoming a blur of moonrises and kills and the taste of engine smoke in his teeth.

His crew noticed all of it, he knew - suspicion had a particularly sour scent to it - but Herc had no idea how to address it, so he didn’t.

Until, finally, almost three years in, his crew chief finally broached it.

“He’s got a crush on you, you know,” the blunt-noses woman said, watching him watching the high scaffolding, where Chuck was digging away in Lucky’s chest. “Spends all his time working on her for you. Best fucking maintenance troop I’ve ever seen.”

“Working on her instead of working on me?” Herc shook his head. “There’s nothing between me and C- Corporal Gerhardt.”

She smiled. “I saw how he was when he got here,” she said. “Awestruck. You, his big hero. Even if he tried to hide it.”

He snorted, and turned to go. A womanish, weak, human thing, gossip, and she had no right to speculate about Chuck. The prey wasn’t allowed to have an opinion about its predators. 

“He used to sneak into your room at night. You’d sneak out with him. Don’t think nobody noticed, sir,” she pressed, following. “I don’t care about who he fucks or how or why, but I need him functional. I can’t have him this heart-broken, running on autopilot while his mind in somewhere else.”

That gave him pause. His boy was heart-broken? Really? “And?”

“I mean, if you’re going to fuck him, then offer him something in return. Praise him a bit for a change, make him feel welcome, instead of ignoring him and pretending like none of us know what you’re on about with him. Stop messing with him, Herc. At the very least, you can’t afford the rumors.”

“Rumors are what the PPDC Public Relations department runs on,” he growled, bristled, letting the demon in him rattle the bars a bit. 

That wasn’t something Herc did often. Vampires always set humans on edge. Much the way mice were on edge around cats. 

The humans in the ‘dome tolerated him in the way that all soldiers throughout time had tolerated him; believing that whatever they felt around him could be merely attributed to his status as a warrior, as a master in the craft of killing. Jaeger pilots were unhinged sorts. Made it easy for him to hide within their ranks.

And his Chief took a step back. “Shit,” she breathed, paling. 

Herc narrowed his eyes. “What were you saying, Chief?”

“No, Herc, I’m sorry, I won’t...”

And he reached out, laid a soft finger on her chin, captured her eyes with his own. Insinuated himself in through the cracks of her fear. Hypno’ing her into submission. 

“What were you saying about Ranger Gerhardt, Chief? What do you know?”

“There’s a psyche report,” she said automatically, eyes going wider with every word that was coming out of her mouth. “It will end him, when the Station Commander sees it.”

“Do you have it?”

A chip was immediately produced from a pocket, and Herc took both it and her over to the nearest console, the old sergeant stumbling, trying to break free, and he squeezed hard on her to keep her still.

 _Manic-depressive personality with borderline OCD,_ the words on the screen reported. _Appears to be fixated on command crew from his assigned jaeger, Lucky Seven. Displays no hope for future, possible suicidal tendencies, vocalized belief that “he is already dead” multiple times during counseling session, withdrawn from unit and refuses to attend any function outside official work duties. Possibly suffering from Post-K Syndrome, with symptoms synonymous with University of Toronto’s clinical analysis of young males, ages 18 to 25, in their 2019 study..._

“You’ve read this?” he growled, rage growing with every word. Like they had a right to question Chuck, a vampire, a being far beyond their limited, mortal understanding. As if they had a right to an opinion about his childe, his _son_... a right to force him to sit in a chair and talk to them and judge him to have some kind of disorder... as if anything could be wrong, as if Chuck was anything less than a marvel, a...

“Every word. I’m worried about the kid, Herc. I...”

But Herc, in his anger, slammed down hard on his chief’s mind, shutting her up, digging for the knowledge of that report.

Too hard.

Her fragile human mind snapped apart under the assault; she collapsed, right there on the hangar floor. And as a couple of the other techs came running to help her, yell at him, _Ranger Hansen, what happened?_ , he could only feel his anger mounting.

How dare they? How rutting _dare they_?

Herc destroyed the chip. 

Hypno’ed every other human who’d seen the report, somewhat more carefully. 

Put the fear of the gods into the Station Commander over Corporal Gerhardt.

Wrote the obligatory _your wife died in the service of the people of the world_ letter to his crew chief’s family. 

Phoned Stacker and got the report scrubbed from the system.

Attempted to talk to Chuck about the disgrace of it, promise him it would never happen again.

But Herc couldn’t manage that one last step, the one thing he needed to do. Herc couldn’t face his boy. He had no idea what to say. Chuck didn’t even seem to want him anymore, as focused, obsessed, with Lucky as he was. And he was probably more pissed about the chief dying than anyone else.

So Herc did the only thing he could think of. 

Flew out to Hawaii.

Where the fucking human doctors were still failing to save his sire.

And finally asked her what to do about his childe.

But her answer only added to his despair.

“One of the hardest things, about being a sire, is knowing when to let go.”

“And you think I must let go of my boy, _máistir_?”

“Our childer never truly grow,” Tamsin said, and touched his cheek with a frail hand, “until we let them spread their own wings. Look at how powerful you’ve become, away from my side, my beautiful _mac_. You wanted to go, so I let you go. It is right. It is the way of things...”

He kissed her hand, let her drink from him, sat with her until she fell back into sleep.

Not knowing what to make of it.

He’d never had a childe before, and on the flight back to Hong Kong, thought he finally understood why it was such a rare thing amongst their kind to make one. Why vampires were so slow to propagate, and so few of them walked Earth’s nights.

Childer.

They ripped your heart out.

And a vampire’s life was too long to live with that kind of regret.

He still meant to speak with Chuck when he arrived back in the ‘dome. Ask, perhaps - as his own human father had once asked him, the morning after he’d lain with a woman for the first time - what his intentions for his life were. _The farm, the hunt, wife and children, glory and renown?_ Something like that. Whatever the equivalent of those things was for vampires.

Something... appropriate. Fatherly. 

Anything.

Had to be better than the queer, uncomfortable holding pattern they both were in. 

But there was Chuck, standing in a group of newly minted technicians, barking orders and issuing direction, teaching them how to rebuild one of Lucky’s kinetic cannons, the weapon in pieces around them on the floor of the bay. 

He was magnificent like that, Chuck was, utterly in charge. Lord of his domain, the promise of love for fealty, violence for failure, inherent in every word he spoke. 

Commanding. Masterful. Just like a vampire ought to be.

Herc wanted nothing more than go to him, kiss him, take him, right there, in the grease and the twisted metal of the battle damage. But he couldn’t; even without the PPDC, if Chuck didn’t want him any longer, if Chuck had never wanted him...

 _His first years away from you, and he runs,_ Herc thought.

Moving away; becoming his own vampire and less his sire’s. And while by the ancient laws Herc had rights to his childe’s body and blood - a right to his very soul - Chuck was a product of a more egalitarian age. A boy who’d been sold into slavery once already. 

Herc had rescued him from that.

He loved his son too much to hurt him.

He loved his son so much, he never wanted to stop hurting him.

Fuck. 

Parenting hadn’t seemed so complicated when he was human. But then, his youngest wife had barely seen her twentieth summer, his eldest son his sixth, when the Romans had come to their village. He’d never really had the chance to be a father, master of a true house, back then. Thinking he could do right by some wild boy from London’s hard streets...

Maybe he was just a shit father.

“You miss him,” Scott said one morning, sometime later, draped over the vampire, 0400 flashing on the console above Herc’s bed. “I see it, you know. What he is to you, your childe.”

They’d had drift training the afternoon before, a wild night spent partying downtown together - his co-pilot had a devious, deviant soul, and while Herc enjoyed it greatly, it worried him too. So many dark places there left unplumbed. So many corners he hadn’t dared try to explore.

“Don’t speak of things you don’t understand, human.”

“No, I know, Herc, I understand. Just... kids grow up.”

Herc thumbed the puncture wound on Scott’s neck closed mindlessly, thinking about the first day he’d had his son properly in his bed. How Chuck had woken up beside him, the gray human resignation of his eyes replaced with a brilliant green wonderment. 

_Dadaí..._

By the gods, his Charles had been so young.

So very, very young.

“Yes, they do.”

Childer grew up far too fucking fast.

Scott merely laid a hand over his heart, smiling in that queer way of his. “I’m here, Herc.”

“Yes, yes you are,” he said, and patted Scott’s hand, and didn’t protest at all when the human rolled up over top of him, mouth pressing to his own, tongue seeking out his fangs, warm and hungry and so, so young... 

The thought of Scott replacing Chuckt filled him with rage. 

Rage, and fear - because Herc didn’t know whether, if Scott asked, he could refuse. 

If he even wanted to. 

Even if it meant that he would lose Chuck forever.

_He’s already fled from you, hasn’t he?_

But the kaijuu warning came up, before Herc could slap Scott away, and Scott was climbing over him, reaching for the panel.

“Proximity alert,” the human muttered, and swung the rest of the way off the bed. “I’ll head up to LOCCENT, see if we’re on call yet.”

Herc rolled over on his belly, watching the jaeger-honed muscles of Scott’s back flex, as he pulled on a t-shirt and shorts and stepped into his flight suit. 

He was a beautiful man. Beautiful and dark, and equal measure rebellious and obedient. 

_He’d make a good childe,_ Herc told himself.

And Scott may have.

Except for a rabbit, making a mad dash across the drift between between them, loosed by the heat of battle and driven on by Scott’s mad glee.

_...silver, it glints in sunlight... din’t know if it would work it works it works... I should be... it should be me..._

Herc didn’t even recognize the sound that ripping from his undead lungs, a fury unlike anything he’d ever experienced raging into his blood.

The kaijuu was big, fierce, and it was making for the pod, but Herc managed to fire off one last, _central dome roof, Stacker, go, now!_ before ripping the comm unit out of the console.

Scott’s eyes were wide - a hare cornered by a wolf. He knew what end was coming to greet him. “Herc, I...”

But the ancient vampire just ripped his co-pilot out of his harness and that lying tongue from his co-pilot’s mouth and those clever fingers from his hands - one traitor such as that did not deserve a death in battle - and set himself to issuing the ruin of Scott Hansen.

+++++

In the drift, memories bubble.

“How do I address you?” Charles is asking, soft and quiet, in bed, the back of his head pressed to his new father’s chest, his new father’s arms around him, inhuman strength cradling him unbelievably tender. He’s waking, and later, he will recognize this moment as the first after his human body died, after he was born to the night. “I feel... your name, it is long and beautiful and...”

“You may use _sire_ ,” his new father tells him, “for this is what our kind call our makers, and it is appropriate. Or _father_ , in polite company. But you would do me honor to think of me as _athair_ , let _dadaí_ fall from your sweet lips when we are together, _mon mac_.”

Charles frowns, some wisp of knowledge that isn’t his pushing at his mind at the curving sound of those word. And it clicks. “That is your native tongue.”

“Yes, dear childe, a beautiful language, and I shall teach it to you as you will. Clever lad like you, will not be a moment before you are speaking it as well as the King’s-fucking-English.” A kiss is pressed to his hair, in an unfamiliar gesture that the wisps name _affection_. His father’s loosened cravat is soft against his skin. “A hunting language, good to use in front of ones such as these.”

Confused, Charles sits up, and smiles at what he sees.

At the foot of the bed, in Mister Connolley’s - _dadaí’s_ \- chamber is the bound and kneeling form of one Mister Jeremiah Briggs, eldest brother and chief manager of the penal estate, the man who personally bid for Charles’ labor contract in Port Jackson.

There has never been a moment, in Charles’ year on the estate, that he did not wish for this man’s - this human’s - death. But seeing him like this, cruelly trussed, lips pressed together and yet still leaking dark blood, terror in his eyes and something salty-sweet in his scent, like the tang of the ocean air in a clear breeze and a bright day...

“That which you are smelling is fear,” _dadaí_ says, coming up behind him, and Charles realizes he isn’t on the bed anymore. That he’s prowling - naked and unconcerned - towards the man who has made his life a living hell, drawn in by a drumming that can only be a beating heart. Fingers curl around his shoulders and words ghost over his ear. “He is scared of you, _a stóirín_ , and what you may do to him.”

Charles feels something shift in his gums as he crouches down, curious about this scent that’s pouring off the human in clouds. “ _Dadaí_ , what may I do to him?”

Father chuckles. “Anything you wish. I tore his tongue out for you. You need not worry about him squeaking for help.”

Charles smiles - marveling, even as he does so, that such a thing only makes him happy, without a shred of disgust. _Because you are free,_ his new father whispers to him through the clinging mists between them. _You are free of any morality save pleasing your sire, and you please me, childe, you please me, my beautiful lad..._

“I wish him dead.”

“Oh, dead he shall be,” and Father strikes; grabs Briggs by the hair and hauls him up. “But perhaps a lesson first?”

“Of what sort?”

 _Dadaí_ runs a thumb across Charles’ lips, his teeth, the length of his now-dropped fangs evident in the soft caress. “Proper use of these, my hungry little lad.”

_How to feed. How to hold and how to lean, how to listen to the heart and see its pulse in the body. Which vein to bite and the right way to wrap his lips around the wound and how much to suck, to drink..._

The knowledge flows to him.

And Charles dips to bite.

Still, even with the murmurs of assistance, the new-made vampire comes away sputtering after only a few moments, unable to swallow the fear-tinted flow fast enough. _Dadaí_ laughs as the human bleeds. “Waste not, want not,” he teases, and strokes the human’s cheek with sharp nails. “We do not need to kill them to live ourselves. But a little, every night or so, is all we require.”

Blood is streaked down his chin and throat and chest, and it should be horrific, Charles knows, the heat against his body’s cold, but it isn’t. 

Nothing will ever be horrific again.

Nothing, save disappointing his sire, smiling so indulgently at him now, with something in his pale eyes Charles has never seen in any man, any living person, except perhaps his mother when he was a very small child, and that not for...

 _You are all I will ever need again,_ he pushes back, and smiles.

“Clever lad,” _dadaí_ praises, but pushes him back from the struggling human, clearly sizing the human up, like one might a fattened calf for the slaughter, his intentions clear.

Charles bares his new fangs, before he can stop himself, old instincts screaming at him to _kill that man_. But he’s on his arse almost before he even lunge in, cheek stinging and a worn boot heavy on his chest. 

His father is holding Briggs by the throat, the human’s feet dangling off the floor, and fury rolls off of him with the killing force of a typhoon.

The new-made vampire doesn’t know whether to flee or curl up at _dadaí’s_ feet and beg for forgiveness, regret flooding him, fear of his own coursing through him now, some deeper, more primal instinct triggered by the affront to his sire, and...

 _Dadaí_ lets the human fall, a snap and a muted scream sounding out at the same time, Briggs’ ankle breaking as he hits the ground, and Charles can barely hear it over the sound of his own whimpering, as a cool hand soothes his shoulder.

“I thought you said I could kill him,” he whimpers, feeling very much again like that little boy he was, cast out into London’s cold by a weak, gormless mother.

“Aye, I said he would die, childe, and die he will,” his father whispers back in that whiskey-warm, and some sense creeps back into the world. “It took much to make you, though, and I need what his death will provide me.” Charles looks up, and realizes he’s crying only when the rough pad of _dadaí’s_ thumb wipes the red-tinged trails of moisture away. “You are mine, Charles MacFearadhach, flesh and bone, heart and soul. Never forget that.”

The younger vampire blinks through the mists. “Ma-MacFearadhac?”

His _dadaí_ just kisses him.

It lasts forever.

It passes in the blink of an eye.

And Chuck, at the press of Stacker’s sycophantic curiosity against the fortress of his mind - fuck, he wishes he had the luxury of shutting down his mind, fucking nosy, noisy, pet - slows the R.A.B.I.T.’s flashing. Long enough to watch Herc once again drain that human overseer dry.

“I don’t need a babysitter,” he explains, as he feels disgust and desire curl out from Stacker’s pathetic little mind in equal measure, watching Briggs in his death throes. 

Raleigh’s blathering coordinates over the comm. 

Chuck doesn’t care. He knows where he’s going. He’s always known.

He’s known since that moment, his first night of the unending night of eternity.

He is not his sire’s equal. There’s no way he ever can be. Not of a vampire so ancient, so powerful, so beyond any mortal description. The sire is first; primal, unsurmountable. Always. In all things. 

Chuck can never hope to surpass Herc. Be a better vampire than Herc.

All he can hope for is, somehow, this, might mean he’s remembered still with fondness. That Herc might look back on his memory with something approaching the love he’d once had for his bratty little Charles.

That in giving his life for his sire, he might finally prove himself a good, loyal, childe.

Worthy.

Not a waste.

Not this thing Herc had seen fit to rid himself of.

The human however - adorable, naive, honorable little boy that he is - is shaken. “I... I didn’t... master, I designed this mission with the intent that Master and his childe would live...”

“Yeah, and I fixed it, so it would work,” Chuck replies blandly. 

Stacker’s guilt through the drift, and lets him see the rest of it, just to shut the nosy little bitch up.

“You jammed the escape pods,” the human moans, catching it. “You... the radiation... why...”

“Like I want to die with that arsehole dad of mine,” he says, and tries to not - in the part of his mind that he can still obscure - to think about that night. His first night as a vampire, as Herc’s son. Herc, killing for him. Herc, kissing to him, warm and flushed with the dying life he’d just stolen. Herc, taking his virginity so gently and so sweetly Chuck had finally begged to be hurt. Herc, tearing him apart and putting him back together...

 _My son, my boy, my perfect childe,_ Herc, whispering again in his ear, _you will do me proud._

 _I’m trying, father,_ he wills, back along their dead bond, knowing it will go nowhere, cursing himself again for not accepting his father’s fingers in the hallway, and Tendo’s screaming about kaiju signatures, and there’s no more time for regrets.

+++++

The news would report all manner of hyperbolic things about Lucky’s destruction.

All manner.

Except for the truth.

It was true that they fell out of alignment, that Lucky was destroyed, that Scott Hansen didn’t make it out of the conn-pod alive. True, that it was a miracle the other jaeger was able to take that fucking Cat III down.

All true.

But it was also true - however unreported - that the reason why Scott Hansen died was because one Fearadhach of Tuatha Taiden, childe of Tamsin Bean Sí, and dark-cursed son of the Dagda, tore that fucking human apart with his bare hands.

That Hansen died screaming, still in the drift, his co-pilot savoring every second of his terror, his confusion, his hideous pain, his final lingering question of _why wasn’t I enough?_ echoing in Herc’s mind. Mixing with the memories of Chuck...

...Chuck, waiting, waiting, where Herc had taken him that first night and held him and loved him and...

_...Chuck sitting in the autumn night, sipping at his bag of raw AB-neg, the harvest moon hanging low over Hong Kong’s dark western hills, dawn at the ready, threatening on the eastern edge of the Pacific..._

_...the roof access door slamming shut..._

_“Hey, Gerhardt!”_

_“What do you want, human?”_

_“Just... just wanted to talk,” Scott says... wearing his shirt his shirt, smells of him, so good, I need him, I need him, he’ll forgive me..._

_...syringe, a syringe in the pocket..._

_“I’ve got nothin’ to say to you, arsehole.”_

_“Yeah, I get that. Herc... Herc’s old, Chuck. You know? You know how old he is? How many... centuries of memories he has? How overwhelming it all is?”_

_“Boo hoo, little human can’t handle being inside a master vampire’s head,” Chuck sneers, eyes to the sky. “Fuck you.”_

_“He’s... he’s a force of nature, Chuck. What you said, once, about me being meat in there... I’m no match for him, I’m not, I understand that now, I’m just not, I’m not, I can’t ever be, not like...”_

_“Human?”_

_“Human.”_

_...the sun rimming the ocean with silver-pink, the new day coming..._

_...(and while Chuck was still young enough to withstand daylight for short periods, it hurt like a sonofabitch, still burned, still killed)..._

_“You see things in the drift. Like Herc making you, bringing you across into his world.” Distant, conflicted. “It’s only you I ever see in him. You’re the only childe he ever made, Chuck. It’s you, in his blood, only you, and you don’t love him, you don’t take care of him, don’t treat him the way a good childe should, aren’t there, aren’t what you should be and fuck, I could do so much better...”_

_...and Chuck, lost in some strange confusion, for all the centuries and all the killing he has on that fucking human, the human moves too fast for him to stop and..._

_...plunging the syringe straight into his neck, shooting the contents deep into his artery..._

_“I should be his childe!”_

_...roof cold, hands hot, Chuck’s skin, so cold, hardening burning like coal, ripping under the stress of dead man’s blood, a fire lit in his veins like gas in a mine shaft and..._

_“Me! Not you, you weak little...”_

_...Chuck gasping, struggling, clearly trying to force his body to respond, to rip the human’s fucking throat out, Scott ebullient..._

_“You aren’t worthy of him!”_

_...hitting him with a fistful of silver chain, shredding skin off, blood faltering..._

_...kaijuu klaxons sounding down below..._

_...just like I knew they would, like the predictions, Herc, you’ll see, you’ll see, I’ll be better than he ever was, I swear, I will, look at how pretty I kill, I can kill for you Herc, like he did, Herc, please, please, please..._

Herc didn’t cease his assault until Scott’s body was reduced to pulp, bloody tears streaking down his cheeks in his rage, until the tell-tale sound of rotor wash above him forced him up Lucky’s hatch and into the harsh light of day.

When the helo dropped him the ladder, Herc gave the human crew no space to ask how he scrambled up it so fast; he simple hypno’ed the lot unconscious, and took the controls. Pushed the airframe far past its safety limits, barking orders to LOCCENT to get him Pentecost, in a desperate bid for the ‘dome.

Everybody saw him, on his way to the roof, got out of his way. Nobody stopped him.

Nobody would have dared.

Not the demon, roaring in his bones, drivesuit splattered red and eyes murderous.

How Herc reached his boy, what route he took or how fast he was moving, he didn’t quite know, couldn’t later recall. The hallways and cat-walks and endless stairs blurred into the moment he burst through the access doors into the fiery heat of the coming noon, the smell of burned flesh and dying blood thick in the air.

In the end, the only thing that saved Chuck was Stacker. The human had spread one of those solar blankets from the emergency kits, heat-reflecting side up, over Chuck’s twitching body. From beside the makeshift tent, he looked up at Herc with fear in his eyes, normally calm exterior flooded with the sharp scent of anxiety.

“He’s in bad shape, Herc,” he stammered, as Herc stormed towards him and his childe’s prone body. “I can’t move him, he won’t drink, I... I don’t know what to do...”

“By the gods, he’ll drink from me,” Herc growled and pulled his boy into his arms. 

He tore at his palm with frantic teeth, pressing the gash to his son’s mouth, but Chuck just coughed, groaning, dark, evil-smelling blood leaking from the corners of his lips, nothing making its way down.

“This makes no sense,” he grumbled to himself.

“He had some chains on him, when I found him,” Stacker said; and it was true, his own wrist was bleeding. “I took them off, covered him as best I could, but Herc, he won’t accept anything, won’t...”

“Quiet,” Herc said, and lay a hand over Chuck’s stomach, recoiling almost immediately at the heat beneath. “Fuck.”

“What?”

He considered his options. Chuck was too weak - body burned, torn by the silver, unconscious, barely clinging to the world - for Herc to just rip him open, and...

Fuck.

“Call the clinic,” he ordered, licking the gash on Stacker’s wrist shut. Got to his feet, cringing at the sunlight on his back, working as fast as he could. “Tell them to prep for surgery.”

“What?”

“Just do it!” Herc picked his boy up, cradling him to his chest, blanket and all,. By the gods, the disaster of his form damn near broke Herc’s heart. “He dies on your watch, Stacker, what the Mongols did to Baghdad will seem a mercy compared to what I do Hong Kong."

“You don’t have to threaten me, Herc,” Stacker said in a low, sad voice, and pulled out his radio.

Herc left Stacker on the roof, barking orders through the hand-set, as he all but flew down to medical. _Hold on,_ he sent to Chuck, over and over, through the bond that was so atrophied as to be almost non-existent. _Hold on, a chuisle mo chroí. Dadaí is here. He won’t let anything happen to you..._

Once in the clinic, at least, Chuck’s eyes fluttered open. Right as they were laying him down on a gurney, the doctors screaming at each other. Herc couldn’t hear any of it, though, couldn’t have cared less, because Chuck had looked at him, Chuck had squeezed his hand, Chuck...

“Excuse me, Ranger Hansen,” a shortish, geeky-looking man in thick glasses said, pushing him away, “but we need to get him prepped.”

“Of course,” he said, numb.

They took Chuck away, the doors swinging shut behind them, Herc left alone in his gore-smeared drivesuit, feeling more helpless than he had since finding his entire human family, burned to death by the Romans.

Stacker eventually found him, laid a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll do him no good like this, Ranger.” He had a bag in his hand and a strange expression on his face. “C’mon. Let’s get you out of that gear.”

Numb, Herc allowed himself to be led to the clinic’s showers, Stacker locking the door firmly behind him and setting the bag aside. The human approached with open hands and head just a little bowed - and it struck Herc, then, how unusual it was; normally, the boy seemed scared of him. But that day, he deferred, graceful and quiet, stripping Herc’s ruined drivesuit from his body and bagging it, before laying his own uniform aside and turning one of the showers on.

“You have blood in your hair, Herc,” he murmured, almost apologetic. “Allow me to clean you up.”

And Herc, sick with worry about Chuck, didn’t question it.

Stacker was his, after it. His sire’s thralled’s brother. His bloodline’s servant. 

“It’s good,” he said, as cautious hands swept palmfuls of subs into his hair and across his body. “You learning your place.”

Stacker was quiet for a moment. A long moment. Confusion sparked through him, although what at, Herc couldn’t have cared less. “Yes, Herc,” he whispered.

Herc closed his eyes, willing himself out into the OR, into one of the nurses he’d seen going in, in her scrubs. She was terrified by what she was seeing. He breathed out. The human’s shamed heartbeat, fast and loud in the tight confines of the shower, was a balm.

“Good boy,” Herc murmured, not caring about the human boy in the slightest, and burrowed deeper into the nurse’s vision.

The doctors were scraping silver beads, heavy with blood, from the inside of Chuck’s chest.

His boy. His poor, poor boy...

“He’s been calling for Hansen,” the doctor from before told Stacker, after the two of them finished cleaning up, after Chuck was out of surgery. The doctor sighed, and cleaned his glasses off with a corner of his scrubs. “I’ve done everything I can, but boss, I’m really not...”

Herc growled and got in front of that. “Just tell me what you know about his condition.”

“Ranger Hansen, I’m sure you understand, I can’t just...” and the bloke’s mouth pinched. “Marshall, if we could just talk about this in private...”

“You’re talking to Chuck’s sire, Doctor Geiszler, he can take it from here,” Stacker said wearily, and nodded at Herc. “You can trust him, Herc. He’s been advising on Sevier’s case.”

The doctors - Geiszler’s - expression went from worried to - of all things - excited. “You... you’re a vampire too, Hansen? Oh my god, this is awesome, I mean, your kind is like... fuck, sir, I’ve got so many questions about... like, do you think I could...”

Herc grabbed the doctor, hand around his throat, and bodily slammed him back into the nearest wall. “Just tell me what’s going on with my childe.”

The doctor swallowed, cast one more look over Herc’s shoulder at Pentecost, and started talking.

They’d given Chuck four blood transfusions during surgery and had him on a fifth, set up like an IV drip. Pulled almost five kilos of silver beads out of his gut. Couldn’t get the injection site on his neck to stop bleeding. Couldn’t keep his skin together. 

“...he’s... look, I’m an exobiologist, Herc, not a vampire doc, strictly speaking, and Tamsin is one thing but...”

Herc sighed, and released the human. Geiszler’s ass hit the floor, but he couldn’t have cared less. “I’ll take it from here, doc.”

“Yeah, but...”

“Leave.”

He waited until Geiszler had scrambled up and out, well and truly gone, and slipped into the recovery room, locking the door behind him.

His boy was a mess, pale form burned raw by sunlight and silver, wounds that should have long closed still oozing, held barely shut by stitches and staples, fingernails chipped and broken; Chuck had to have put up one hell of a fight, before Scott...

And Herc found himself wishing he’d left Scott alive, or turned him, so he could kill him again and again and again.

But Scott was well and truly dead, and Chuck still clinging to life, and Herc didn’t regret either of those two things.

“ _A rúnsearc_ ,” he murmured, smoothing back an errant red lock from his boy’s forehead, and eased himself onto the thin hospital bed. Eased Chuck into his arms.

It took almost as much of his sire’s blood to save Chuck as it had to turn him, and it hurt, losing it. But Herc would have given his last drop to keep his boy from the final death, and so he let Chuck suckle, hard and deep and long.

Until the last of the burns vanished from his skin. 

Until his eyes opened, pained and bleary but the vampiric green just as beautiful, as otherworldly as it had been, the first night Herc saw it.

“Sire?” Chuck asked, voice hoarse, lips stained, a kind of frantic need in that one word. Herc’s heart broke all over again. “Scott, he...”

“Gone,” Herc said, and didn’t know what to say about that. _He won’t do this again_ or _I love you, only you, I tore him apart for you_ or _nobody hurts what’s mine_ or _I’ll take you away from this, we’ll come away, we’ll go back to our house and let the humans live or die on their own_. 

But he couldn’t get any of that out, drained as he was, practically shaking with grief and rage. 

“He’s gone,” was all he could manage.

Tears welled up red in his son’s eyes, but Chuck screwed his lids shut against that and burrowed closer to Herc’s touch. “He said he’d make a better childe...”

“And he’s dead,” Herc said firmly, and kissed him again. “Put him out of your head, my boy. He’ll not touch you again.”

Chuck was silent for a long, long time.

“I want Lucky, Herc,” he finally whispered. “Wanna pilot.”

Herc bit the inside of his cheek so hard his teeth took a chunk of flesh out. 

Chuck had never called him by his first name before - always _father_ or _athair_ or _dad_. _Dadaí_ , when he was particularly far gone or vulnerable or needy. Never _Herc_. Never, in two hundred years. Had things between them truly become so terrible? “Lucky’s gone.”

But Chuck squeezed his hand, tight enough to break bone. “I wanna jockey, dad. Please, I wanna jockey with you,” he said again, with all the insistence of a little boy who believed his father could do anything, would do anything, for him.

“Oh, _mo ghrá thú_ ,” Herc whispered, not sure what he was agreeing to, and pressed a kiss to his son’s forehead. Cradled him close, rocking him like he was newly-made again. “I swear. You and me and the conn-pod, love. Just us.”

Against his chest, Chuck nodded.

And, crisis passed, the hunger, the effort of bringing Chuck back from the brink, began to roil in his veins. So the old vampire hit the nurse’s call button and told himself Pentecost wouldn’t miss whoever was stupid enough to show up.

He still let Chuck have first bite.

Despite the fact his son’s mind was closed to him, despite the fact they were in hospital and everything stank of chemicals, of humanity’s desperate attempts to stave off illness and death, Herc, for the first time in years, felt at ease.

Just like old times.

+++++

In the end, it worked out fine.

Mostly.

Sort of.

As well as it could.

The rumors got around the ‘dome. Fast. Hard. As rumors in military units always did. 

Ranger Scott Hansen, trying to kill Corporal Gerhardt. Ranger Herc Hansen, catching it in the drift and falling out of alignment, horrified. Herc, rushing back to base, pulling Gerhardt from the roof, getting him to hospital in time, saving his life, refusing to leave his side, caught the next morning, in bed with him, a hidden affair from the Academy finally coming to light, the corporal’s selfless dedication to his Ranger finally being rewarded...

Lies, most of it. _A version of the truth everyone could live with_ , Stacker said of it; but then, what else could a rumor ever be? 

Herc didn’t mind.

Meant the doctors let him stay with Chuck. Meant his crew forgave him for fucking around with one of their own. Meant nobody looked too closely at Scott’s remains.

And with Tamsin dying in hospital and Lightcap retreated into the anonymity of her lab and the comfort of her childe since Brawler Yukon was destroyed, Herc was the senior-ranking vampire in the PPDC. Utterly _done_ with a human Marshall and a distant sire dictating his life.

“We’re taking Striker Eureka,” he told Stacker, the night Geiszler cleared Chuck to leave the clinic. “My boy’n’ me.”

The human started, out of the bed where he’d been sleeping, fumbling for the lamp. “Whathe... the fuck?”

Chuck, at his side, smirked, and flipped the lights on.

Stacker, naked to the waist, clutched his blankets tight to him. Tried to glare. To look threatening. Cute.

“The fuck is Striker Eureka?”

Herc folded his arms. He wasn’t about to tell the human that the Eureka Rebellion had been Chuck’s first war. That the boy had been so lovely in it, so excited, lost in the glory of the kill. That Chuck had always been beautiful in battle, and seeing him square off against a kaijuu was going to be glorious.

“The Mark Five that’s in final testing now, commissioning in a few weeks. The one my childe and I are gonna use to win you this war, _sir_ ,” Herc said, twisting the honorific a bit, just enough to be disdainful. Remind the boy what his place was. “She’s due off the line in a month, and our names are going on her chest.”

“What? No, Herc, you can’t... she’s going to the Gages and we’ve already... the fuck is that name?”

Herc just smiled, and Chuck laid two soft fingers to the pulse point, just under Stacker’s jaw. “We’re takin’ her, boy. If there’s a piloting conflict, I can always pay a visit to Los Angeles, and handle the Gages myself.”

Stacker blanched. “Chuck...”

“... or you could be a good little human,” Herc interrupted, “and do as I say.”

“You really should let Herc handle the long-term strategic planning. Make the big decisions for you,” Chuck added, kneeling up on the bed, pulling that blanket away, trailing soft fingers across the drive suit scars from Onibaba. “He rode with Ghengis Khan, after all. It’ll be a little late to make the necessary changes to her design, but I’m sure you can find the funds.”

Stacker’s eyes were black, fixed on Herc, lust and fear warring in his scent. “I can’t just...” 

And he gasped, as Chuck dug a claw into the soft skin between his pecs, bending in to lick the trail of welling blood.

Herc caught the faint whiff of old chemotherapy within those veins. He had been sick off and on over the time that had passed, Stacker had, but they’d never spoken of the human’s illness. Herc had no interest in asking now. It hardly mattered; all humans died in their due time. How it happened was no concern of the vampires.

“You proved your loyalty to me on the roof a few days ago,” Herc murmured, and went over to sit on the edge of the bed, touching Stacker’s cheek, Chuck making a little show of his feeding. Herc gathered up a bit of Stacker’s blood, and held it out to him, the threat of not accepting implicit. “Didn’t you?”

Stacker sighed, defeated, and parted his lips.

No anger, no defiance, like there had once been.

Just acquiescence. 

Just a deep, boiling need.

The taste of the human Marshall’s blood was changed, and not just from the chemo, when Herc bit him.

Fascinating.

The news about Striker went out the next day.

And, when it came time to make a little show of Herc finding a new drift partner, Stacker made sure the right things happened, that the right story got passed to the PPNC.

What they reported, everyone reported.

And what they reported was one for the history books.

_Corporal Charles Gerhardt, a member of Lucky Seven’s ground crew, has been selected today as Ranger Hercules Hansen’s new co-pilot. Corporal Gerhardt was previously thought to be drift-incompatible, but has made a name for himself as one of the best J-Techs to ever graduate the Academy. Marshall Pentecost had no comment as to why Corporal Gerhardt was included in these trials, nor why he washed out of the Academy back in 2016._

_The initial neural handshake between Hansen and Gerhardt stabilized at 99.5%, a record for the program. Sources from the Hong Kong Shatterdome say that during a recent hospitalization following an industrial accident, Hansen didn’t leave Gerhardt’s side during the length of Gerhardt’s recovery, leading to rumors that the two are, in fact, lovers..._

By the next morning, their faces were plastered on the front page of every major newspaper across the world.

And the world fucking loved it.

Herc called a briefing with the entire team when they returned to Hong Kong to facilitate crew transfers; Lucky’s crew was being absorbed by the squadron in Sydney, a few new specialists being brought in there in to train everyone up on the Mark V’s unique features.

And, of course, Chuck’s introduction as Herc’s new co-pilot and drift partner.

Chuck received a standing ovation from all of their old crew, embarrassed and awkward in his stiff new flight suit. Still, it didn’t stop the little shit from yanking Herc in by the velcro of his waistband and kissing him, deep and hungry.

Despite the ‘dome’s blackout policy on social media, photos of that ended up online.

By the end of the week, in the eyes of the world, Striker Eureka’s Rangers were enshrined - for better or worse - as the PPDC’s new power couple.

It became a little game for Herc, one so, so easy to play. He didn’t have to do anything except give offended non-answers when somebody asked about the nature of their relationship, act the commanding senior officer when Chuck was mouthing off to the cameras and the indulgent lover when he wasn’t, punch a reporter or two in their smug mouths when they inquired as to Chuck’s supposed age and the unacceptability of.

And, of course, molest Chuck every so often, in places that were easily photographed.

Such a lark.

In public.

In private, however, things weren’t so rosy.

Herc had imagined things would improve between them, after that little incident. After how affectionate Chuck was in hospital. How needy. How sweet.

But nothing changed.

Nothing went back to the way it used to be.

And it should have; really it should have.

Because the first time they drifted - plugged into the simulator, Chuck bracing himself for his first time in the Pons - everything should have been okay.

Humans, from what Herc had learned, chatting with Lightcap, could hardly manage the drift. Their biology instinctively rejected that kind of closeness. Took a very special kind of man to open his mind up to it, even with the system his brood-sister had pioneered. _It’s a shallow derivation of what we experience,_ she’d said, thick glasses she couldn’t possibly have needed tumbling down her nose, her childe - weak, as she was - huddled into her side in the lab. _It’s impossible to accurately recreate, but it’s good enough to pilot these metal beasts of theirs._

_Shallow?_

_If our bond is a ocean, the drift is little more than a stream, rain falling from the rooftop gutters, puddling on the grass. Plenty of places to still hide yourself, easily mastered and twisted to a vampire’s own ends, without damaging the handshake at all. Your human partner, the Hansen boy, won’t see anything you don’t let him have access to..._

But, pale and shallow though the drift had always been with Scott, just as Lightcap had warned, Herc hoped against hope that it would be different for him and Chuck.

That he could open himself, just as he always had through their bond, and Chuck would fall into him, just as he always did.

That for the first time in almost half a decade, Chuck would come home.

No more Scott. No more Lucky. No more distractions. Just the endless embrace of their shared state, flowing cool and soothing between them, the old roil of emotion and desire and affection and memory and belonging and _won’t you come with me into the darkness darling son dear father my brother in blood tear into me I welcome you..._

And despite the fact that they held their handshake perfectly, that everything flowed full and deep between them, that afterward Chuck was near-desperate for Herc’s cock in his arse and fangs in his neck and they made love on the simulator floor before they could even be disconnected, it wasn’t that.

Wasn’t hardly anything.

Chuck - still, eternally, painfully - wouldn’t let that bond reassert. Wouldn’t open into the drift as he had to the blood, and he wouldn’t take the blood.

“We have the drift now, old man,” he said, when Herc finally broke down and found the bare Gaelic - always easier, his native tongue - to inquire with. “Why would we need anything else?”

“Chuck, for centuries, we...”

“Wonders of modern technology, old man.”

And his son just shook his head and slid off their bed, shoving his feet back in his boots and over the grease-stained trousers he’d been wearing all night. 

“Chuck,” Herc groaned, “it’s damn near bedtime.”

“Fuck sleep.” Chuck grinned at him, that cocky little expression he’d been cultivating for the past few decades breaking into new life recently, befitting a jaeger pilot with a record-breaking kill already under his belt. “Promised Chief I’d help him look at that hydraulic problem in Striker’s left sling blade release. You know, the Chief you haven’t killed.”

Herc rolled his eyes. “It’s zero-five, Chuck.”

But his son just pulled his ballcap down over his head and stuffed his laces into the top of his boots. “Gotta go,” he said shortly, and vanished.

They killed their second kaijuu the next day. Their third, four months later. 

And that’s how things went for a while. 

Killed kaijuu, hunted and fed and fucked together, and got into bar fights in downtown Sydney and drifted with minds closed and memories hidden, their bond fading, failing. But Herc still longed for the night, at the end of the war, when they might... 

And then Tamsin died.

And took the last of Herc’s hope with her.

+++++

“She wanted you here,” Doctor Geiszler said outside her room, a fresh tattoo on his forearm. Yamarashi. What his obsession with the kaijuu was, Herc had no idea. Even to him, it seemed obscene; like a vampire burning a crucifix into his own flesh with silver, perhaps. Idolizing the enemy. “But you... I have to warn you, Herc, she is not the woman you remember. Even from a few months ago.”

“How so?” 

“I’ve tried, I have, for years, but... but nobody knows what this is. Nobody quite understands how this happened. I can’t even take tissue samples, the damn things break down as soon as they’re culled. But from what I can tell, it’s almost as if the radiation is acting like sunlight, caught in her bones and eating through her soft tissues. I... I can’t flush it from her body. I’m sorry, really, I am. Your kind...”

“Do not call us amazing again,” Herc warned.

Geiszler flinched. 

Chuck, not quite lounging in a plastic chair on the other side of the hall, raised an eyebrow. “Marshall was exposed for the same amount of time that she was. Why isn’t he fried from the inside out?”

Herc bared his teeth. “Oi, boy, show some respect!”

“For your sire, who fucked me into the tech corps?” Chuck shot back - in Gaelic, thank the gods.

“How about for the man who saved your life?”

But his boy just snorted, and fell silent, and Herc had a sudden desire to spank his derisive, disrespectful little arse. Hard. Shove into him dry and watch him bleed and _remind_ him...

Geiszler coughed nervously. “Umm... to answer Ranger Gerhardt’s, uhh, question, Tamsin’s body absorbed the bulk of the radiation. I think. We’re seein’ a lot of cancer in your older pilots, or did, I guess, before they all, you know, died. Only real explanation for why Marshall Pentecost is still alive.”

Herc couldn’t stand to listen to a second more of that - his sire, dying for near a decade, all her thousands of years of wisdom and strength and power, given to save one pathetic mortal man, one...

He growled at them all, and shoved into his sire’s room.

The reek of death assailed him; the decay of flesh and rot of blood heavy in his nose. The windows had been sealed off, the room lit only with the unsteady flicker of a candle in a hurricane glass, but he didn’t need it to see his sire, slumbering fitfully under a pile of furs.

She always did like her furs, he remembered, and didn’t know whether to punch a wall or just weep.

“Childe,” Tamsin acknowledged, and reached out with a gaunt hand, her skin so pale it had become transparent. Herc could see her bones, the faint glow of the radiation, burning her from the inside out. 

“Sire.”

“It is good that you came., childe. Good to see you, one last time.”

“Sire, is... is there nothing you can do? Nothing I can do? Perhaps... we have not tried...”

“Hush, my lad,” she whispered, and touched his cheek with weak fingers. “I am sure you have heard the tattooed doctor’s explanation, that I have the sun in my bones.”

“Yes, but...”

She smiled at him, fangs cutting bloody trails on papery lips. “My bond-thralled was killed by Trespasser, before I could make her. What a sister she would have been to you, _a ghrá_. But alas, she is gone, and I am going to her now, in the Bright Lands. It is right.”

He remembered the cave, where she’d taken his body, the darkness in which she had shone, as she spoke to him of what he had become, what she had made him. 

_The sun and silver and fire and the wood of the blessed ash are the only things that can kill you now, Fearadhach. You are untouchable. You are immortal..._

A thousand miles she seemed from that dark goddess. A thousand miles and a thousand years. _Gone_ , Herc found him thinking desperately. _We were supposed to be immortal._

“Sire, please...”

“I take pride in knowing that her brother will avenge us all. T-Take care of him for me.”

“I know, _máistir_ , I know.”

“G-Good. That is g-good, Fearadhach, that is good.”

There were many things Herc wished he could ask of her, many answers to many mysteries she had still not revealed. Advice to glean, and history to understand. But Herc had never been good with words, with saying the right thing at the right time, and his meager faculties had seemingly deteriorated with every new language he’d had to learn, every century he’d lived.

Standing by the edge of his sire’s deathbed, he could summon nothing. No emotion. No words.

So he kissed her hand, and stayed with her, until the fire finally burst through her skin and there was nothing left but ash and grief.

Nothing but the memory of her voice, filling the void that had suddenly yawned open in his soul, deep and alien and unwanted as the Breach itself.

“By the gods,” Herc heard, and looked up to see Chuck standing behind him, wide-eyed. “The fuck happened?”

The words still wouldn’t come, so Herc just shook his head, and Chuck was draping around his back, cheek pressing to Herc’s neck, hand offered, palm up and open and pooling.

But the older vampire just closed his eyes and nose against it, and pushed it away. 

“ _Athair..._ ”

“You should get away from me, Charles,” Herc murmured in reply, and closed the teeth-torn gash on his son’s palm, feeling the skin knit back together under the pad of his thumb. “Get as far away from your sire as you can.” 

_...before such grief falls on you._

Chuck was silent for a moment, and then gripped his collarbone hard enough to break. Released. Headed for the door. “Oi, ‘m not going anywhere, old man,” he called over his shoulder. “Who’d keep your ancient arse out of trouble, huh?”

It sounded like a promise. An oath. 

But it didn’t help anything. Didn’t make Tamsin any less dead. 

Didn’t bring his Chuck back to him.

So Herc watched him leave the room, and Herc let him keep his distance, and eventually, the sharp agony of loss dulled to the faint ache of regret.

As they fell apart.

As the PPDC fell apart.

As old jaegers fell, and new ones were left to rust, half-finished in their dry docks.

As everything died.

And then, years later, Stacker pulled Herc up to Alaska for the Icebox’s closure, and asked him what he thought about a thing called Operation Pitfall.

“Needs refining,” Herc grunted, after reviewing the plans.

And Stacker looked at him, a growing, cancerous desperation stamped in his darkening eyes, and Herc decided the planning could wait until the following night.

But there was no solution, no solution he could find, that did not involve a suicide run. Carrying a bomb into the Breach. That was the only way it could work, would work. 

“We have to take it in, childe,” he explained to Chuck, a few nights before he was due to brief his revisions to Stacker. “All the way. Dump Striker into the throat, and eject before we hit the Breach itself.”

Chuck was quiet. “The radiation from the blast...”

“Shouldn’t hurt us.”

“It hurt Tamsin,” Chuck replied, oddly subdued, and flinched when Herc glared at him. “Your sire, it killed her. The human pilots can carry it in.”

“How?” Herc countered, equally quiet. He’d already looked at that - dumping Raleigh Becket and Gipsy and whoever the other co-pilot was to be into the Breach actually seemed a neat solution. But Striker wasn’t the fastest jaeger in the world solely because of her engineering; her vampiric pilots were what made her the killing machine that she was, and Chuck had reworked her a dozen times over the years, optimizing her systems for their use. No human team could successfully pilot her.

She needed them.

The mission needed them.

Neither of them spoke for a while, and Herc found himself longing for the bond. The drift, its pale imitation. Anything. Anything to tell him what was going through his son’s mind right now. 

“Chuck...”

And his boy shook his head. “I quite like my life, dad. I don’t want to lose it on the behalf of a load of ingrate anchovies.”

“Chuck,” Herc said, knowing it was the wrong thing to say and not knowing how to put what he was feeling any better, “what good is a predator when all the prey have gone?”

“Sire, the radiation will kill us, as it did... as it did your sire.”

Herc shook his head. “My sire was old, strong in the darkness. You... you are not nearly her age, and you can still walk in the sunlight with weakness the only consequence.”

Chuck’s face twisted, dimples contorted. “Sire?”

“I pulled you from a roof once,” Herc continued, forcing himself to say the word, “with five kilos of silver in your gut and almost four hours of exposure. You survived. You will survive this too, Chuck.”

“And what if you do not?” Chuck rasped back. “You can hardly handle fifteen minutes in the light anymore. If the fallout... _athair..._ , if you do not...”

Everything in him was screaming at him to discipline his childe, not let his progeny push against him so. The worry for his sire’s life was touching - and appropriate - but Herc was more than wiling to accept that risk. There were a dozen ways of working the mission plan. 

And even if there was not...

No father wanted to bury his son.

So Herc brushed his childe’s concerns away, letting the beast surface in his words. “ _Do not_ question me, childe, or I will make it an order. We are ending this war, you and I, seeing this task through.”

 _And then I shall take you home and into my bed and not let you stir from my side for a century or more._

For once the kaiju were gone, the jaegers would go as well. No more jaegers, no more drifting. No more drifting, no more excuses. 

Chuck would come back to him.

They’d be together again, body and blood.

Everything would be set to rights.

The fight went out of Chuck at those words, and, as if recognizing the truth in them himself, nodded.

“I hear my sire and I obey him,” he whispered.

“Good,” Herc said, and smiled at him, and held out a hand, in invitation and command both.

Chuck’s palm fell cool on his own, and there was nothing but pure surrender in his blood as Herc sank his own long fangs into that perfect neck.

+++++

Stacker regarded the two vampires sitting on the other side of his desk with not a little trepidation.

Of everything he’d faced in this war - Onibaba, the UN, his sister dying - this was what he hated the most.

What he dreaded.

Those fucking ginger devils.

Smiling at him, like they could smell his desperation for them.

Who knew, maybe they fucking could?

Prior to that night in Hawaii, Stacker had never been with another man before. Never even thought about it. Certainly had never dreamed of surrendering, begging, bleeding, pleading for another moment of penetration, another lingering kiss, his waking days filled with the memories of cool hands on overheated skin, razor-sharp fangs ripping open his very soul...

He didn’t fear Herc and Chuck hurting him. He feared them _not_.

He hated it. Hated feeling so... out of control. So not his own.

 _Sometimes, a man can become addicted to the intimacy of the Kiss,_ Tamsin had told him once, a few years before she died her final death. _I’ve taken too much from you, Stacks, over too long a time. Let Herc do with you what he will, or risk another of our kind, but you will keep coming back for it. You have no other choice now._

She’d always been right.

Her and her ancient wisdom.

Some of the things he’d seen in the drift with her...

Herc cleared his throat. “So, Stacker, thoughts?”

The human shook himself, and shuffled the mission plan back into its folder, wanting to ask about the radiation. But a dull diffusion of pain spread out from Stacker’s lungs just then, his breath hitting the rotting channels all wrong, and he made no show of hiding his discomfort. No point. They could smell the chemotherapy on him, the illness, the cancer.

“Sorry,” he coughed, and fumbled in his desk for his box of pills.

In public, they all put up their own little fronts; Stacker the unwavering commander. Herc the reliable senior pilot, Chuck the brilliant junior, both of them studious soldiers and attentive lovers and nothing but human. 

In private, none of them bothered. Hadn’t for years. Especially not the two vampires. The teasing, happy, flirting Chuck who’d been practically draped across Herc’s lap at their first meeting was long gone, seen only on the occasional magazine cover, captured with a long-distance lens in pixelated photographs. So too was the Herc who’d chuckled and petted and cuddled his childe in bed, when he thought Stacker was riding too high on endorphins and blood loss and orgasm to notice.

Chuck was bitter now, Herc resigned. 

What had happened between them to cause such a falling out, Stacker had never rightly known. 

And in truth, he shouldn’t have cared. It shouldn’t have mattered.

But he did. It did. Mattered more to Stacker than the PPDC, or the jaeger program, or the fucking Wall of Life, or Mako - his sweet Mako, who he’d tried so hard to keep far, far away from these demons, but whether that was to save her or have them to himself, he didn’t want to know.

_...you will keep coming back..._

Stacker knew he was hopelessly ensnared.

A hare in the trap.

And yet, the only thing he felt, when he looked at the two man-killers sat across from him, was an intense desire to please, to serve, to give his last drop of blood and his last breath for a fleeting smile or a murmur of approval.

When Herc nodded at the pill box, Stacker tucked it away again. Without taking a pill. 

“How long have they given you?”

He winced. His chest was on fire. “I’m Stage Four, Herc. Could be days, could be months. They don’t know.” 

The older vampire twisted the ring around his finger, obviously considering. The younger was just sort of watching him with a disinterested, irritated expression on his pale face. He’d seen Chuck’s stats; highly unusual neural pathways, not like Herc’s, which were so smooth they defied an human description. 

And Stacker went cold.

“What is this?”

Chuck snorted, and picked at his dog tags for a moment. 

Stood. 

Prowled over to the edge of the desk and leaned in, mouth pinched and pale eyes intent, fey and deadly, shedding the human trappings of dog-tags and boots as he approached. 

And as Chuck touched Stacker’s shoulder, he was no longer the insolent, insouciant Ranger he played for the cameras, but a god. The night incarnate, the rising of the moon and the dying of the light, the beginning of the endless midnight and the wheeling of stars that was his sire; Herc, watching with an almost indulgent bemusement.

He wanted - so, so badly - to believe that he never would have given into them, never have found them, if the kaijuu hadn’t risen to destroy everything good. Everything he loved. 

But they had. And all that was left to him now was service, and death.

And as Herc had once said, a warrior needed a master to serve.

A decade under their fangs had taught him what was required now. Despite the burning in his chest, the human Marshall slipped from his chair and sank to his knees, overwhelmed anew with a desire to please, to prove oneself, to be thought worthy...

“How would you like the thrall?” Chuck asked.

Stacker’s mind stuttered to a halt. That was the one thing he’d never been given, the one Tamsin refused to offer and Herc had never deigned to mention. Ageless, undying, a human preserved and kept only for a vampire’s purposes. 

Thralled. Herc’s, belonging to Herc, bound to Herc, his will, the evil that dwelt in him...

“I’m not,” he stammered, scarcely knowing where the words came from. “I’m not, we haven’t... I don’t deserve, I...”

“I know we haven’t, _bábóg_ ,” Herc rumbled, his voice warm velvet rubbing across Stacker’s very soul, coming around to touch his shoulder. “But you’ve been so patient, such a good little boy, you deserve your reward for your loyalty to my blood...”

Normally, Stacker steeled himself against the vampires’ caresses, forcing himself to stand firm, not break down and collapse into it, give himself over. He’d been fighting a losing battle for possession of his own soul, Stacker realized - watching Herc raise a hand to his mouth and tear the skin with his fangs - ever since the first moment he’d laid eyes on his sister’s strange, beautiful, mysterious new girlfriend. The second he’d let Herc touch him. Chuck bite him. 

The problem with a vampire’s Kiss, Tamsin had once told him, was that the human became addicted. 

He’d been fighting so hard against it. Trying to stay his own. Trying not to give in.

He never wanted any of this.

But in that moment, as Herc held out his hand over Stacker’s face, palm down, thick, dark blood trickling down to splash on his face, he didn’t care any more. 

He didn’t care about anything.

Just them. Their blood. Herc’s blood. Herc...

It fell over him, carrying with it Herc’s presence, the weight of Herc’s darkness, pooling in his eyes and on his lips, that oozing gash finally pressed to his mouth to fill him and taken away again, to empty him.

And it was like drifting with Tamsin all over again. Drowning in the sea of a vampire’s mind.

The cancerous burn began to subside, to ease, and Stacker took a deep lungful of air, marveling at the taste of it, the heavy copper, clinging to his teeth and enveloping his very soul.

“Herc...” he gasped.

“Master,” Chuck corrected, voice like smoke over Stacker’s senses, obscuring the world further, as Herc’s dominance flowed into him, curling at the base of his skull, soothing and screaming and indescribably evil. “You call him master now.”

And even as a boil of fresh-forming instinct screamed at him to parrot the word back, overwhelming him, Stacker allowed himself one last moment of horror at what he’d allowed himself to become.

 _Luna,_ he thought, scrambling at the edges of his failing sense of self, _what happened to us? Why couldn’t we just say no?_

+++++

Time was a strange thing for a vampire.

Humans experienced it in a steady rhythm, Herc had observed over the years. Caught in the current, they bobbed along at the same rate as everyone else, the river of time passing at a constant pace. 

Vampires, immortal as they were, dwelt on the banks of that watercourse. Whole decades could - and had, in Herc’s experience - slip by unnoticed, the individual moments that meant so much to the living blurring together like rain falling on the forest floor; recognizable and discernable from each other, but hardly worth the trouble. 

He and Chuck had lost years before, lost in each other, each night seamlessly flowing into the next, the hunting and the feeding and the tinkering and the love-making and the silence of the wide skies and bright stars of Australia. 

Before Chuck, Herc had spent a millennia alone. A few centuries with Tamsin, after she’d made him, a long adventure that ended with the faltering of the Roman Empire and the rise of other, more diffuse human societies. Chaos, the continent had been then, and he’d fallen into it, swept along on the waves of man’s brutality to man. It had only been the discovery of gunpowder that Herc had roused himself and taken an interest in the world again. 

It had been a few decades after that, perhaps, with a small boy begging at the step of his carriage in Temple Bar, that he’d felt the first pangs of loneliness - realized how much the Roman monsters had taken from him, how he’d never had his chance at having a family, at truly being a father.

He’d put that little boy out of his misery that night, and saw the body buried, with all respects due the gods. The Bright Lands were a far better place for an urchin such as that; the Bright Lands were a far better place from the hellhole the English had turned his once-beautiful homeland into. Even the humans around him - _Irish_ , they styled themselves - and their pale desert god agreed that death was preferable to the rot they’d made of the old gods’ realms.

Herc needed a childe for whom death would be no mercy. One who would be, in the making, born to what he truly was, rather than destroyed, the foundations of his spirit clad in the strongest of dark-forged iron by the power of the blood.

He had not properly gotten around to dreaming up criteria, before he’d grown weary and emigrated to Australia, looking for the open skies and fresh air and untainted blood of his youth. 

And pulled from a pit in a reeking stable yard the one the gods had put in his path.

His son. His unmade, unborn son.

Waiting still in his human form.

Waiting for him.

Waiting to be set free, to his anger and his ecstasy, to the world’s despair.

Herc had started paying attention to time, after he made his Chuck his own. Didn’t want to miss a single one of those little moments of growing up, the moments any parent would have treasured. 

His new-made childe’s eyes opening for the first time, baby fangs suckling at Herc’s vein in his first meal.

Learning to speak - _athair_ the first Gaelic that ever fell from his tongue. 

Learning his letters - _this is how you hold a quill_ and _these are the sounds contained herein_ , Chuck staring at him as if Herc had just taught him the deepest of magics, or cuddled into Herc’s lap and, in the whale-oil light, reading aloud the first page of his little primer. 

Learning to hunt - prowling the streets of Port Jackson, of Melbourne and Brisbane and Sydney, so unsure of himself at first, and then so eager, so skilled, a walking nightmare promising ecstasy in the fall.

Learning to kill - when to toy and when to strike, how to seduce and how to terrify, how to wrap his lips around the bleeding wound and take that mortal life into his own immortal form, sustenance for another day or week or month. 

Every moment of the last two hundred years, Herc had tried desperately to cling to.

Approaching the eve of Pitfall, it became more critical than ever. But Herc had never been good at keeping track of time, and in the chaos, it was almost impossible to focus on Chuck and the PPDC and Striker and all the rest.

He held on to the PPDC.

With Chuck, Herc had an eternity to look forward to. 

But not if he didn’t bring the fucking Kaiju War to a victorious conclusion.

The old vampire had been - since Stacker accepted the thrall - running the last days of humanity’s last stand. If it hadn’t been for Herc, pulling the strings of power in the Pacific, pushing his influence through their beloved Stacker Pentecost, the whole endeavor would have failed. 

Stacker would have offered little effective push-back against the politicians on the Wall. Made no deal with the Russian mafia for that bomb, nor arrangement with Chau for the funding. Committed to none of the other hundred shady little side-projects that ensured the survival of the jaeger program. 

The man himself would have long given up and died with honor, rather than let himself be sullied by such sordid things.

And ever with Herc’s control cured around his mind, he’d still begged and pleaded over some of the things he had to trade away, promise, give, to make it all happen.

Stacker had always adhered a bit too closely to Christendom’s notions of chivalry for Herc’s taste. 

It was cute, in a way, that the foolish little bunnies needed a wolf telling them what to do, their Marshall’s mind bent to a Ranger’s, the very success of the final mission depending upon vampiric immutability. In another, however, it pissed Herc right the hell off.

Having to defer to his thralled in front of the humans, making a little performance of their interactions. Actors were whores, pretension loathsome, and Herc hated every second of it. To minimize such necessity, he had tried to keep Stacker out of the public eye as much as possible, but he couldn’t keep the man from the troops.

Or from taking a eighteen hour plane ride to Alaska to find the last living Mark III pilot on the planet.

Apparently. 

Herc hadn’t given him the order to go. And had it not for the cancer, the vampire’s plans for punishment would have involved a cat o’ nine tails.

But leave Stacker had, and come back Stacker did, barely a day after Mutavore and the cutting edge of impenetrable fortress walls that had become Chuck’s mind in the drift. Stacker, tugging in his wake a beautiful all-American boy in a hand-made sweater, reeking of grief and tragedy and the need for somebody, anybody, to tell him what to do.

How that one had made it five years on the Wall, with nobody looking out for him, without getting thralled or killed, Herc didn’t know. Raleigh Becket might as well have hung a shingle on his front door, inviting a vampire in. He hadn’t been like that five years ago, in Manila, his older brother too protective and Scott Hansen too eager for Herc’s Kiss for Herc to get anywhere near him.

How fascinating.

Herc made Chuck hang back - boy had always had a thing for blonds - and smiled at Raleigh and shook his hand oh so carefully, modulating his words just so.

“I’m sorry about your brother, mate,” he said, kindly as he could, curious.

Sadness unfurled in the human’s voice. “Thank you, sir.”

Herc had other duties to attend to - such as ensuring Stacker hadn’t damaged himself, being away from his master for almost two days - but he smiled at Raleigh and squeezed his hand, opening a crack in the boy’s mental defenses and sliding a murmur of promise, of comfort, into his bleeding mind.

_...everything you desire, everything, just come to me..._

It was the same thing he’d once whispered to Chuck, in the delirium of his son’s slave-year. But whereas Chuck’s mind answered with violent desperation, Raleigh’s echoed in weary submission.

Soldiers always broke in such pretty ways. 

Chuck needed to learn the finer points of thralling, sooner or later, and Becket had a forgiving psychology. A new pet might be a perfect present to...

But it was no time for pleasant thoughts of post-war fun. Raleigh was pushing Stacker for answers about Pitfall, and Stacker was too weary to lie, and Herc pressed in as close as he dared on his thralled’s mind, feeding the right words in the right combination to shut Becket up. Slipped a final “Herc?” into it all.

_...Master, please, I’m sorry, Iamsosososorry, please touch me, please, I’m starving, I’m burning, I need you, I need, I need, Ineed..._

Herc took Stacker back to his quarters. Let him have the few drops of blood that the thrall-bond required. Took his own fill from the human’s veins. And, leaving him with a large glass of fresh orange juice, panting in his bed, went about his rounds.

Caitlin’s old lab partner - some German vampire she’d befriended back in the 1600s, body mangled, cursed by ancient magic, and as obsessive as Herc had ever seen one of their kind come - had been sending Herc frantic emails for the better part of the day. 

Gottlieb. He was the last of the research department Herc had bothered to keep around. Only one Herc needed. The war was going to be run by vampires, and he had no patience for human academics, who prattled on about their specialties as if it fucking meant something. The Enlightenment had been a terribly painful thing to live through. 

Time. Time. Vampires and time.

For the first time in almost two thousand years, Herc felt as if he didn’t have enough of it.

If Chuck was right, if his ancient bones couldn’t survive the mission, if a fire was stoked in them, the way a fire had been stoked in Tamsin’s...

But as long as Chuck endured...

It was right.

+++++

“You did what, Stacker?” 

“Mako, she’s... she’s too inexperienced to step into the cockpit, she can’t handle...”

“If she is drift-compatible with Becket, she goes out.”

“Master, if she goes out, she’ll die...”

“Don’t be selfish, _bábóg_. You have given your own life to me, have you not?”

“Y-Yes, master, but please...”

“Then you will give me hers as well. Now, where’s that fucking shoe?”

+++++

Two hours later, Herc was screaming at Gottlieb to shut up as he hypno’ed Geiszler out of a coma.

Three hours later, Herc was sending Geiszler out to pay a visit to Hannibal Chau, with a card that invited Chau to take as much blood as he liked, as long as Geiszler was left living long enough to bring back the necessary intelligence from the drift. 

“He is mine, you know,” Gottlieb growled in Low Germanic.

“Then you would do well to follow him now, or claim him better in the future,” Herc said, and slammed a compulsion so hard into Geiszler’s brain that there was no chance of disobedience.

Four hours later, Herc was scraping Raleigh out from under Chuck’s claws, before the stupid childe dropped his fangs and showed the whole fucking world what he really was.

The scent of anger was so thick in the hallway, the older vampire could barely think.

Fury hung on Raleigh’s features as he lay, sprawled on the Shatterdome floor, too enraged, it seemed, to know just how close to death he truly was.

And Chuck, Chuck...

“Hey, this is over!” Herc growled, grabbing his childe with every ounce of strength he had, keeping him from the human’s flesh but barely. “Gerhardt, you’re a Ranger for Chrissakes, why don’t you start acting like one?”

He’d imagined the use of the false surname, the worthless god, would calm his boy, cut through the killing haze. Remind him that it was not Charles, son of Fearadhach to whom the Ranger Hansen was speaking, but the Ranger Gerhardt, who’d nearly beaten another Ranger to death in a hallway.

But Chuck just stared at him in horror. “ _Athair_ ,” he whispered, just once, voice breaking.

And turned away, storming back down the hallway.

Leaving the scent of blood-tears in his wake.

+++++

Herc wasn’t able to find his childe for the rest of the night. 

Or the rest of the next day, Chuck buried instead deep inside Striker’s chest, working on that synapse line that Mutavore busted loose.

Or so Herc was told by the J-Techs.

“He’s amazing, Ranger Gerhardt,” one of them, a Canadian who’d volunteered to transfer from Alaska during the drawdown, told Herc as she pulled him aside. “I mean, I know you two are together, which is awesome, by the way, so I’m not... he’s amazing with these machines. Like he was born in ‘em.”

 _Together_. Herc started, hearing that come out of the little girl’s mouth. Strange. He hadn’t thought about that in months. “If he pokes his head out anytime in the next forty-eight hours, tell him his lover needs to see him.”

She flushed, but nodded, and promised she would.

But it wasn’t until the next night, with Gottlieb’s prophecied double event, that Herc laid eyes on Chuck again.

Hanging back at the mouth of the harbor, Herc tried - he did. Sent everything he wanted flooding into the drift, a surge of emotion and memory and half-dreamed fantasy. Assailed the thorny fortifications of his childe’s mind with one single image; him and Chuck together on the rough wood porch of their bush house, curled into each other, blood free, the stars wheeling overhead in their endless dance.

But Typhoon was taken down. And then Cherno. And despite Gipsy’s admirable victory, all of Herc’s carefully laid plans were blown out of the water by the loss of his vanguard.

It was going to make it much, much more difficult to eject before the explosion. The escape pods in Striker were nuke-hardened; Herc had seen to that, upon assuming command of the jaeger. But nobody had any idea about the effect of an atomic explosion on a vampire. None. 

Everything he’d imagined, all his contingency plans, came down to one simple fact; they had to eject before detonating the payload. They had to. Radiation was one thing, but the explosion was quite another. Nobody had any idea about that. 

Maybe Caitlin...

“I already phoned Auntie, dad, a few weeks back, asked about the blast problem m’self,” Chuck said, sitting atop Striker, watching the battle in Hong Kong, all rain-swept lights and broken glass. “She hasn’t got the report together yet, but she gave me the highlights.”

Ghost drifting, that little catch, and Herc hoped that perhaps...

“What’d she say?”

“You and I... we can’t go down together. You’re too old, Herc, too deep in the night. You won’t... you can’t go down, old man.” Chuck turned his face into the rain. Hong Kong was groaning behind them. “But I’m younger than you by a long mile. I’ll be fine.” And Herc noticed he was clenching a fist. “So I’m going, and you’re not.”

Herc didn’t know what to say - not to the conviction ringing in his boy’s voice, not to the first hints of affection and dedication and, dare he, _love_ he heard underlaying the simple little words. 

“Chuck...”

“We’ll just need to find me a co-pilot.” And Chuck bared his fangs in a killer’s smile. “Raleigh, perhaps.”

Herc rolled his eyes, and reached for his boy. “When we end this, I’ll give him to you with bells on his pretty little norks, but until then, we need him in Gipsy.”

Chuck huffed, and slicked a wet hair through dark hair, turning his cats-eyes on his maker. “Sire...”

Herc warmed. “Good work, my boy,” he praised, letting the gratitude flow out of him, into whatever was left of drift and bond alike, for the sound of that word, keeping his doubts back. Was Caitlin truly sure? Could he trust her, after what Chuck had done to her once? A plan, Herc needed a plan, make sure Chuck was safe, just in case the boy tried to do something... Australian, down there.

But that could wait for the morrow.

“ _Athair_...”

“ _A rúnsearc_...”

For the first time in years, Chuck didn’t push him away. But rather, crawled into his lap - drivesuit and all - and took Herc’s face in both hands, threading gloved fingers into his sire’s short red hair. His green eyes shone like emeralds in the Pacific night.

“ _Más é do thoil é, athair,_ ” he whispered back, and he sounded broken. 

Herc kissed him. And kept kissing him. Until the choppers came and even then, Chuck burrowed into Herc’s arms and wouldn’t let go, not even when the crew tried to force him into a seat as they flew back to the ‘dome. 

Herc held him close, breathed in deep the scent of his boy’s hair.

Tomorrow, he’d said goodbye in a hallway with his arm in a sling. Tomorrow, he’d offer Chuck his blood, their bond. Tomorrow, Chuck would stare at him with dry eyes and tell him _I know_ and walk away from him, cold.

But for the moment, the bitter scent of Kaiju Blue rising in the air, things felt good.

Felt like old times.

Felt right.

+++++

It wasn’t until his master locked in the CNS electroneural transponder into the spinal port that Stacker couldn’t hold it in any longer.

“Young Master... how are you and I supposed to drift?”

Master’s hands stilled on his body.

And Young Master peeled away from the wall, where he’d been watching the entire suit-up in his own battered gear with disdain on his face - prowling over.

Stacker’s heart sunk in his chest.

He hadn’t meant to insult.

But Young Master was Master’s childe, both of them perfect, and he, some insignificant little human...

He had no right.

They were alone in the drivesuit room, the technicians thrown out and under orders not to return until they were done. Nothing more than the Marshall convening with his Rangers, before the final drop, Master’s arm in a sling and the story already ricocheting around the ‘dome; Herc Hansen, injured when he loosed from his harness, unable to jockey.

The plan... the bomb... Stacker wanted to weep.

Everything was moving too fast to catch.

He was just grateful it was Master running things, instead of him. Master had been doing a much better job of it, the past few months; speaking to the right people, saying the right words, getting done the things that needed to be done. Stacker hadn’t had the will to do it before, nor the strength, but Master made him...

Stacker had been nothing before the thrall, worthless, empty.

Master was everything...

His Master’s childe - Young Master, worthy of respect, needing so much respect - chuckled.

“You’re an egotistical jerk with daddy issues,” he said, and cupped his cheek with soft fingers, considering him, standing in front of him with all his centuries of power wrapped about him. “But you are my father’s thralled. We’ll drift just fine.”

Stacker blinks back sudden tears. “Thank you, sir.”

“Chuck,” Master said, “give us a moment.”

“Herc...”

And the flurry of Gaelic that followed was angry, fast, and ended with Young Master leaving in anger, still yelling over his shoulder as the doors slammed shut once more.  
Master sighed.

Stacker whimpered.

“Shh, shhshh, sweet little pet,” Master said, and the reassurance of the words pushed into the human’s mind, twilight across the sky of his worry. “Do not tremble. Your master needs you yet. You’ve been such a strong boy for him. Don’t buckle on him now.”

Swallowing down his anxiety - _Master makes you strong_ \- he nodded.

Master smiled at him, coming around in front of him, laying his hands on the polycarbonate shell of the drivesuit. 

“He is sending you, _bábóg_ , because you are a good boy,” and Master’s hand caressed his neck, soothing and cool against his shame-hot skin. “Because you have been loyal to your master’s bloodline. Because you will do what you must for it, won’t you? Protect his childe, yes?”

He didn’t even have to think. Why would he? Master surrounded him, filled him. He was nothing anymore but an extension of his master’s will. “Of course. Anything.”

“That’s a good boy,” Master said.

And, overwhelmed, he fell to his knees, burying his face in his master’s hands.

“Master,” Stacker breathed, hardly aware of what he was saying, what he was doing. “Master, hurt me, please hurt me, I need you to, I need...”

“Shush, _a stóirín_ ,” Master said, and petted his cheek. “Shh. Don’t worry. Today, your master shall hurt you worse than you have ever been hurt. He’ll kill you, give you a grand warrior’s death, a triumphant entrance to the Bright Lands.”

“Yes, master, of course, I know, of course, please...” 

“Anything you need to do to get your master’s childe in that pod, out of Striker, before you detonate the bomb, you do. You get him out.”

He nodded, a gratitude of the highest water flooding his being, and kissed Herc’s hand. Stacker realized he was weeping, and couldn’t stop.

 _I love you_ , he thought in endless gratitude - after Master let him have one last taste, filled him to the brim, pushed all else away, gave him the strength to walk out onto the hangar floor, his presence steady and strong behind him, grounding him. _I love you, I love you, I love you..._

He said the words Master whispered in his mind to say. Goodbyes to a daughter he scarcely cared about anymore. To a crew he barely recognized.

All he could focus on was Master.

The duty he was sworn to do.

Ensure the safety of his master’s childe safe out there. Down there.

No matter what happened down in the Breach. Whatever it took.

His life for Chuck’s.

It was right.

+++++

Chuck is taking the final leap, pushing his jaeger towards the Breach with everything he has.

He hasn’t been a good son, and Herc hasn’t been a good father. Neither one of them have kept their promises to each other, especially not these last few years, and Chuck’s not selfish enough to get lost in the rage of that. Herc might be a cold bastard, but Chuck’s his childe; he’s incapable of not loving the old vampire. Even in his angriest moments, his deepest furies, he can’t not love him.

So this is something he can give him.

He can give him a chance. For getting it right next time. Maybe with Raleigh, way the old man’s been with him. Touching him, smiling at him, scenting him...

Raleigh would make a good vampire, a perfectly obedient childe, pretty and violent and subservient. 

Just like Scott would have, before Herc killed him in one of his possessive, stupid, greedy, selfish little fits. 

Like Chuck used to be, back when he was still everything Herc wanted. 

But even if Herc no longer finds him worth the time, Herc is all Chuck has ever wanted. Wanted to be near him, wanted to be like him. Nothing but the two of them against the world, a perfectly matched pair of hunters laughing their way through Sydney’s eternal night. Sleeping through the heat of day, tangled in Herc’s arms, in Herc’s bed, with Herc’s fingers twined through his and a promise being whispered into his mouth...

Stacker’s doggish concern is like a shiv through the memory, and it’s all Chuck can do to keep from tearing out of the harness and pummeling the human unconscious.

He growls instead. “Stay out of m’head, human.”

“Master, please, listen to me...”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” he orders, and shifting pressure on Striker’s hull - in his circuitry suit - signals him better than any screamed concern from LOCCENT.

A Category V, in front of him, rising from the Breach.

Stacker breathes out, his mind a furious mix of duty and fear and love and panic and _fear_.

 _Finally,_ is all Chuck thinks, and relaxes back into his harness, into the fight, into the drop of Striker’s blades and the surge of power through her engines, into the joy of the hunt that his father had taught him, so many year ago. 

His life for Herc’s.

It’s right.

_Finally._

Everything’s right.

Everything’s alright.

And Chuck is prepared to let it all take him away.

When Stacker - fucking human lap-dog that he is - rips out of his harness.

+++++

Herc slips out during the festivities, needing the quiet, needing to be alone.

Chuck... 

They haven’t found his escape pod. 

From all indications, Chuck didn’t use an escape pod.

It made no sense.

Herc had had plans - of course he’d had plans - of a little private celebration. Slipping away in the night to a private yacht with black-out curtains, sailing out to one of those still-pristine reefs in the west of the Dutch East Indies - Indonesia, whatever. Then back to Darwin, stealing a nice car, heading home. A honeymoon, perhaps, of sorts, celebrate the end of all this bullshit, some time to just reconnect, bond again, be together. Whole, in each other, just them.

Them, and Raleigh Becket in a collar.

But all those happy plans have died, ash fallen cold in his heart.

Because the pod never surfaced. 

Chuck, from everything LOCCENT can gather, is dead.

And it doesn’t make a stitch of sense.

Stacker had always been near-frantic to please, and Stacker was loyal as a dog, in that unique way that only military men ever were. That fucking human - Englishman, yes, but a _thralled_ Englishman - had fucking _promised_ he’d...

_...my father always said, when you have a shot, you take it..._

So why the name of all the gods hadn’t Stacker stuffed Chuck in the fucking pod?

Why hadn’t he done his fucking _job_?

It’s a question that haunts Herc, all the way back to the cramped quarters that he shares with his son.

Where a letter is waiting. On his pillow. 

A proper letter, this, he realizes as he picks it up, on good paper and sealed properly with wax, even if it is the PPDC logo that’s stamped into it. From Chuck, Herc can smell, his boy’s blood serving as ink, dizzying-sweet.

Confused, he cuts it carefully open with his pocket knife.

Chuck’s dog tags slide out into his palm, and Herc cradles them, trying to figure out what he’s looking at.

The words make no sense.

_Dearest Father,_

_If you are reading this, I assume I have not returned from my final mission. Writing this as I am from a point previous, I cannot speak to my success. I will have done my damnedest to deliver Striker’s payload; I would like to think that I have closed the Breach and justified the sacrifice of the past decade in so doing._

_There will be no escape pods, no return, no repeat of those days when you pulled me from the roof or from the pit for your own unfathomable ends. I disabled the accursed things, just to be sure your new pet did not get clever on me. Auntie Caitlin was never consulted; she always was a useless thing, and I did not need her counsel to confirm what we both already know. Vampire or not, an atomic explosion kills all in its path. I meet my final death down there today, and I am glad to see it come._

_Do not bear me any ill will, Father, nor begrudge me the deception. I have never much cared for my own life, pathetic thing that it was, but always possessed the upmost concern for yours. I believe we share this opinion. And I know you have not been happy with me of late. I know, I know, all the things we never said, as they dwelt in the bond we once shared, but the bond is gone and I accept your choice._

_So when this became apparent as the only thing I had left to give you, I gave it freely. Now, truly, you are free to find yourself a true son, who will love you in the way you wish to be loved, and give you the things you wish to be given. Measure up, as I never could._

_You were always the better of us, Father. It is right._

_With Undying Affection,_

_Your Childe,_

_Charles MacFearadhach_

_P.S._

_If you deem it fit, sire, could you offer sacrifice to the gods for me, for safe passage to the Bright Lands? I am sorry to ask, as I know our kind are not given overmuch to grief, but I have no other kin, and I think it no further shame on my blood now, to say that I am scared of what lays beyond the final death._

Herc reads it in disbelief, his son’s old writing voice coming through strong and clean, his own grief growing with every word.

The letter still smells of that boy. His determination. His courage. 

His fear. 

Fear...

His boy went down to the Breach, terrified, knowing full well he wasn’t coming back, thinking... thinking... what was he thinking? What the everliving fuck was he thinking?

_...the bond is gone and I accept your choice..._

“Gods,” he whispers to himself, heart breaking. 

How had his boy come to this?

How had he pushed his boy to this?

What had become of their little family?

_I am scared._

Herc reads it again, and then destroys it. Destroys everything in the room. Tears the walls apart, the ceiling, every trace of anything recognizable, until he shatters even the immortal bones of his hand on the heavy lock of the door, screaming, and falls against it, weeping and weeping until it feels as if he’ll die his final death from blood loss.

Nobody hears him. Nobody comes.

Why would they?

The humans have always been scared of him. Always wary, never trusting, seeing a vampire in the end only as death incarnate. Not Stacker, who knew what he was and dreaded. Not Scott, who knew and desired. 

Only Chuck - only his little human Charles - had ever looked at him differently. 

Only Chuck had ever just been _curious_.

Chuck had always been curious.

His one bright star in this endless night.

Gone.

Herc doesn’t stay.

Of course not. Why would he? 

He strips down and washes the ruin of their shared quarters from his skin and dresses mechanically in his filthy khakis and the one ancient henley that managed to escape his claws, a hour before. Herc leaves everything else but the dog tags - which he hangs around his own neck before departing.

There is nothing that matters here. Nothing but memories, and scents, and death.

So Herc goes to where something of his boy remains. Back home, to the bush, a mere fifty miles from where he once pulled his childe from the pit of his own despair and gave him the immortal beauty of his soul.

He was supposed to be eternal, his son. 

Meant to shine across the centuries.

And Herc watches the sun rise over the wet leaves of January’s forest, from the porch of the house that once used to be so alive with Chuck’s laughter, and wonders dully if he shouldn’t just walk out into it.

Let everything die.

+++++

Chuck doesn’t die.

He was supposed to, and he doesn’t, and he feels like a failure for not.

Still, the humans think he has, and Chuck Gerhardt, PPDC Ranger and Savior of Earth, is probably well on his way to the history books, and so maybe it’s all okay. 

It’s not, though. It’s not.

He wasn’t supposed to live through this. 

But Stacker - fucking loyal little fuck-up anchovy, that one - bollocksed the whole thing up. Hit the countdown sequence on the payload, and before Chuck could stop him, tore loose of his harness, strapped a life-vest to Chuck’s leg, tugged the inflation tab, and blew out the conn-pod hatch. 

Arsehole.

And after the vest dragged Chuck to the surface and the tides tugged him to shore, after Chuck shredded his drivesuit and sent it all back out into the nighttime waters, he was left with a horrible question. 

What to do with himself. 

And the empty eternity, stretching out before him.

He’s never been without Herc. Never been on his own. Never known anything but his father, even if his father threw him away. Striker gone, Gipsy gone, the last of the jaegers taking with them the drift technology that had held he and Herc together these years past.

Chuck never once doubted the purpose of the war - as his father had said, a predator is no good without his prey. And before that first meeting with Tamsin, he and Herc had discussed coming into the PPDC much the same as they had going into World War II, or the Great War, or a couple of the smaller conflicts that came before that. 

They’d had to go. They’d had to see it through. 

Chuck knew that in his blood. Clung to that - for his blood was Herc’s blood, and he’d believed that if Herc had felt differently, if Herc had wanted to return home and leave the humans to their own demise, he would have felt it himself.

Now, in the night surf of some Vietnamese beach, Chuck doesn’t know what he feels. He’d wanted to be in the Bright Lands. Dead. Over. Done.

But he’s still here, still in this world, but he can’t feel Herc’s presence, coiled and purring in the back of his mind, like a tiger in the dark, and it scares the shit out of him.

He didn’t want to die. Didn’t want to be alone. 

Still doesn’t. 

No, he wants back in. He wants Herc back in his heart, in his mind. Under his skin, reminding him that he has a fucking place in this fucking world.

A home.

By the gods, he wants his _home_ back.

But it’s gone now. 

Gone.

Herc had pushed it away, that day in the hospital.

The only time Chuck had been brave enough or desperate enough to offer, Herc had pushed him away.

So he tries, for a while, to lose himself in the human celebrations bursting into life across Southeast Asia. To soak it up. To be proud of what he did - what he and his sire did together. He doesn’t watch the news or anything like that. Can’t stand the idea of watching Herc gloat, of seeing Raleigh Becket with pale eyes and the daylight ruddiness fading from his face.

...Herc, smiling at the boy - shaking his hand, saying kind words about his brother, feeding him, _testing_ him...

Just like Scott motherfucking Hansen.

Herc’s been trying to replace him for years.

 _...a rúnsearc, my precious boy, come back to me,_ Chuck hears in his mind sometimes, sleeping away the daylight, wherever and however he can manage, usually in some reeking hole somewhere - Herc was always better at this shit; finding bolt-holes, charming a decent flat or hypno’ing them an invitation into a private home. 

Herc’s always been better at everything.

Instead, the vampire just moves in and out of the parties, the orgies, the explosions of excitement in a dozen different cities. Loses himself in the warm bodies and hot blood around him, but it all just leaves him cold, the hunt worthless.

Months, he goes like that, hiding from the sun, staring up at the stars, hating Herc for pushing him aside, for breaking his promise, made all those years ago, when he offered Chuck this darkness, this beautiful curse. 

_...a father who will teach you all the things that you might be, who will never abandon you, who will care for you always..._

But he’s drifting ever further south, the longer he runs, and eventually, he finds himself in some shit hole named Port Moresby, and he can almost smell Australia, he’s so close.

And so, in the end, like any boy returning from a war, he goes home.

In the end, it’s the only thing he knows how to do.

He appropriates himself a boat, and then a car, blacking out the windows with spray paint for the long ride down through the interior. For a few days, he talks to nobody, not even to eat, stopping only one last time for petrol and a few mouthfuls of O-pos in one of the faceless little outback towns he and Herc hunt in sometimes when they’re out at the bush house.

Tasteless, that blood.

It’s dark enough, and close enough, so Chuck decides to fuck the petrol, leaves the car and walks.

Chuck almost stops, turns tail and runs, a dozen times in the ten kilometers out. He doesn’t want to see Raleigh here, hanging off Herc’s arm, beautiful-pale and new-made.

Raleigh, with fresh killer’s eyes gazing up at the stars as Herc whispers the stories of the constellations to him, as the night died to day. 

Raleigh, fangs stained red as he nurses from Herc’s wrist, the way Herc used to let Chuck feed, back before he had his power under control, before he knew when to kill and how to not.

Raleigh, laughing in delight, with his arms wrapped around Herc’s neck and his back to some boulder and Herc buried deep, like how Herc used to take Chuck into the bush and show him how dance, how to pray, how to offer sacrifice to the gods below as the stars wheeled overhead, and making love in the human way, in the druid way...

Raleigh, eager little wall-building puppy that he is, showing Herc some bullshit little toy he’d made and Herc laughing him and calling him _my clever boy_ , the way he used to when Chuck would present him with some engine he’d machined or contraption he’d thrown together for fun, steam and electricity powering the movements, Herc always so happy to obtain anything he needed to make his little pathetic projects, buying or stealing or killing...

Raleigh, or Scott, or Stacker, or...

Fuck, Chuck doesn’t want to see himself replaced, doesn’t want to be the son who failed, who couldn’t be everything his father was, who wasn’t worth the keeping. Even though he knows it’s coming, he can’t stand it, can’t bear it.

What if Herc’s here?

What if...

And he’s so lost in his worry that he doesn’t even notice...

He’s standing in the drive.

And Herc is on the porch.

But not with Raleigh.

Not with anyone.

The old vampire’s alone, staring up at the sky, drinking cold blood straight out of the bottle, and by the time Chuck sees him, it’s far too late to run. 

Because Herc smells him.

Smells the rush of anticipation that’s flooding Chuck’s blood, the surge of fear, the need to run, run, run, until his undead legs give out, and...

“Charles?! Chuck, gods, are you... are you there?”

Chuck wants to run. Fuck, how he does. Get as far away from here as he can. Leave all this bullshit behind. He tried so hard, but he’s just nothing that he needs to be - not Herc’s equal, not as a vampire or a warrior. He’s not... he can’t...

“ _Chuck, STOP!_ ” and there is nothing but a paralyzing, heart-breaking, endless pain in his sire’s voice, even as the command in them lock Chuck’s legs, compel him to _stop_. Those blue eyes fix on him on him, powerful as they always are, mesmerizing and deep and _everything_ , everything he could ever hope to want, everything he loves, and...

And Herc, stepping into the flood of starlight beyond the darkness of the porch now, just reaches out with a shaking hand, and there are tears in his eyes. 

In some other world, perhaps, or in one of those fairytales Herc used to tell him, lulling him to sleep as the sun rose outside, they would talk. Or Chuck would run. Or one would grab the other and they would make love there, in the human way, under the winter sky. But they are who they are, in the world that they own, and neither of them was ever good with any of this shit.

“Sire.”

Herc’s hand touches his neck. “Childe,” he whispers back, the word leaving his lips like a prayer. 

Chuck can’t help himself, not after almost a decade; he needs it, needs his sire, his father, his daddy, his everything. And he tilts his face into Herc’s hand, cheek to palm, his neck, his blood, his very soul, on offer. He wants to say something, but he can’t, the words sticking in his throat, the emotions beating at the collapsed bond, unable to get fully through but hammering nonetheless.

He lays a hand on Herc’s chest. His sire’s heart is stirring. It almost never stirs, not anymore.

And that’s when Chuck’s own tears come. 

“ _Athair,_ ” he whispers, and the first bead trails down the corner of his nose. “Please...”

“Oh, my sweet boy, _a chuisle mo chroí_ , don’t beg, please don’t beg,” his sire whispers, impossibly fond, and Kisses him more gently than he ever has before, fangs sliding into Chuck’s neck with agonizing care.

Chuck whimpers.

It hurts.

Exquisitely.

Perfectly.

Nothing is hard tonight, the air cool and the stars soft in the high clouds. Chuck lets his body slip into Herc’s embrace, all strength and authority and dark power, and Herc gathers him up effortlessly, as surely as he did that first night, when he remade Chuck in his own image. When Chuck was born. 

Now, like then, he carries Chuck up into the house and up the stairs, into the wide and vaulted upper story that serves as their daytime retreat; no windows, nothing but comfort. The wound on his neck oozes slowly, staining the shirt he nicked off some boy at some hostel in Darwin.

His dad Kissed him there.

Dad Kissed him, and they’re kissing, and...

He clings to dad as dad lays him down on the dark sheets, the black silk his sire always says sets off the brilliance in his eyes, the ivory hue of his skin. They smell musty, these sheets, of a too-long stay in the cupboard, and Chuck - as Herc begins nipping down his throat - promises himself that they’ll never again be so long from home.

Away from each other.

 _...my beautiful boy..._ he catches, as if in the drift, but far stronger, far richer, full of intent, and Chuck arches into Herc’s next bite.

It’s the bond, and Chuck’s crying properly now, he needs it so badly.

“ _Athair_ ,” he sobs, running a hand through his dad’s hair and wishing there was more of it to hold on to. That they hadn’t been playing soldier, that they lived again in a time where men grew their hair long and there were no machines of war. “ _Athair, le do thoil..._

Herc shushes him with a kiss, running both hands heavy and firm around the curve of his arse, palming him through his ill-fitting - also stolen - trousers. 

“I have you,” he whispers back, and Chuck has no idea what language they’re speaking now, and it doesn’t really matter. He’s sucking again, the angle right for Chuck to crane up and bite, creating a feedback loop that floods the mindspace between them, filling them with each other once again, the bond surging back in a thundering cacophony of memory.

...Herc, not wanting to go, not wanting to disappoint, so excited, so proud, so eager to see him, so crushed, _Tamsin, Tamsin, please let me go to celebrate with him_...

...Chuck, wanting to go, not wanting to lose his dad, furious, furious, they can’t be together, dad won’t come away, he can’t go forward...

...Scott, standing in the shade of the hangar, as if he has some right to Herc...

...Chuck, so bitter and so strong, barking orders in front of the jaeger...

...not wanting to get in the way, interfere, interrupt, make things harder, _I can’t come by, the humans will see, they’ll know_...

... _please don’t die_...

... _please drink_...

... _can’t let him die for me_...

... _can’t face this endless night without him_...

Herc, beside him, has his face buried in Chuck’s shoulder, making a little sobbing noise that’s strangely soothing, for all the grief it carries. Tears are coursing down Chuck’s face, as everything they are is laid bare by the force of it all, waves stripping the coastlines of their minds bare; all the mistakes and misunderstandings and failures and words of love left unsaid. 

If the drift was a current, this is a typhoon, a tsunami, a storm of their own making, a force of nature that no machine could ever hope to emulate. 

The bond reestablishes. 

Chuck splays a hand across dad’s shoulders.

Dad’s hands curl around him.

Chest to chest now, fangs sink into each other at the same time. 

They don’t talk but just ride it out, tumbling into each other in the depths of black sheets, breaking when it becomes too intense, coming back together almost immediately when even the momentary separation becomes too much. In the moments or hours or years that follow, they bare each other, shedding and stripping away their clothes, needing the contact as a bulwark against the buffering force of the last ten years, their bodies slippery, slipping against each other.

Herc’s hand curls around the back of his neck, supporting his head on his bicep, those fingers soft on his vein, even as his other hand slips down to tease at Chuck’s entrance. The younger vampire keens - dad hardly ever toys with him like this - and licks up into dad’s open mouth, slicing his tongue open and getting both of them laughing.

“Make love to me,” Chuck whispers as he reaches up to stroke dad’s face again, like he had on Striker’s roof, all those months ago. Promising, with the gesture, everything he had, to keep his sire from...

Dad catches his hand, forcing it back down to his chest, and kisses every one of his fingertips. “ _Mo ghrá thú_ ,” he murmurs back, and bites the spot, right over Chuck’s heart. “ _Mo mac..._ ”

And dad rolls him over, Chuck letting his forehead hit the mattress and pulling his knees wide under him, arse presented, spine curving in pure submission. “ _Dadaí,_ ” he begs.

“Shh, childe, shh,” and knuckles run up the nubs of his spine, fingers twisting into his hair, waves of affection breaking in the space between them. “Shh, I know what you need. Need your daddy, my baby boy needs his daddy...”

“Yes, daddy, _dadaí,_ please, please, ple-ahshit!”

Dad, pressing in without warning, sheathing himself to the hilt in one long, cruel stroke.

It hurts from behind, thick and heavy and tearing his tight channel open - Chuck’s human body had died virgin, after all, and his vampiric form has never truly loosened up - but it hardly matters. The pain only makes it better.

The pain makes it perfect.

Dad thrusts, and feeds, and Chuck meets every snap of dad’s hips with his own, move for move, and destroys a pillow with his fangs. The gentleness it began with starts to fade, getting rougher the more they take from each other. Closing the raw edges of their little circle. Forming themselves once more into something perfect, and he needs...

Chuck, using every bit of speed he can, throws Herc off and climbs on top, smearing himself dark and thick across dad’s pale chest, every dig of his nails leaving bloody trails in their wake. Herc grips his hips and thrusts up into him as Chuck bends, tonguing up their combined essence, closing the scratches and opening new ones. Biting dad’s nipples gets him a growl; smearing a sticky hand across dad’s face gets him a roar.

Herc grabs him, light as a rag doll, and hauls Chuck up into his arms, kneeling up and dropping him hard back onto his cock. Normally, they’d need a human to keep this up this kind of , but Herc’s let the chains off the demon and nothing’s going to stop him now.

So Chuck laughs as he slams down on dad’s cock, wrapping his arms around dad’s neck, scraping bloody trails up dad’s spine, and lets his head fall back as dad attacks the hollow of his throat, crying out at every thrust.

Most amazing thing he’s felt in a long, long time, the painpleasure more intense, it seems, than it’s ever been before, the bond threatening to drown them in each other.

But it’s the memory of the hospital that triggers his climax, caught up in the tsunami of dad’s grief, dad’s love, dad’s _why did I let this happen to you, darling boy, he hurt you, he hurt you, I should have kept him alive to hurt him for you, hurt him until the sun burns out, until everything else has died..._

The orgasm that shakes his very foundations, the blackest magicks that bind his soul to the night, is entirely unnecessary.

+++++

The sun is coming up outside, warm tendrils of pink spreading across the rim of the world, across the winter-wet forests and windswept plains of their chosen homeland.

Herc is watching it from halfway up the stairs.

Where he’s watched it every morning since getting back, wondering if today would be the day he found the courage to walk out into it.

No need for that now, though. Not today. Not with his boy back, safely tucked into his bed and into his mind. Things, for humans, might have changed in light of such a sordid series of events. Change came hard to vampires, though; Chuck is still Herc’s child, and Herc still Chuck’s sire. Whatever apologies they owe each other, they’ll muddle through. Like they always do. 

But Chuck’s back, back from the dead, and Herc is not going to let anything come between them again. Keep his promise. Care for him. Never let him feel so alone or so isolated as he has these years past. Be a father, always, to his boy. 

It’s what they both need, after all.

Right now, Herc’s got a liter of velvety-rich blond mid-twenties surfer at his side, decanted and warmed. Stabilized, this blood, like all the bottled shit, but that quiet strength, the deep connection to the ocean, the sheer peace that was this human’s life is still thick and heady in its scent. Expensive and hard to come by, such blood, but Herc had bought it in Cairns on a whim. 

Something, he thought at the time, that Chuck would have loved.

Now, it’s a nice bedtime snack for his boy. They both need the nourishment; sex is always draining, in more ways than one, and last night was extraordinary in that regard. Herc chugged down half a liter of cold AB-neg in the kitchen while he was waiting for Chuck’s own supper to warm; boy’ll drink most of it. He’s always had a thing for blonds. 

Nothing’s perfect, as the sun edges the rim of the world, and perhaps nothing ever will be, but _not even the Bright Lands could be better than..._

 _Come back to bed,_ Chuck reaches out from the bed, easy as breathing.

 _...than us_ , Herc smiles, and collects their supper, heading back up the stairs and dropping the trap-door, sealing out the sunlight, striking an oil lamp awake on the little table they keep here for that purpose.

The first flicker of light dances across Chuck’s pale skin, making his scattering of human freckles glow.

They’ve made a ruin of their bed; shredded and stained, right down to the box springs. But no matter. Chuck is in it again, sweet and smiling and eager for his daddy. What are a few sheets against that?

His son holds out a hand for him.

And Herc lets himself be drawn in.

“My darling Charles,” he whispers against Chuck’s lips as he crawls over him, takes his place once again atop his childe, sets the tray with its old handblown glassware aside. “ _A leanbh, a mac_.”

Chuck sighs, and wriggles in, half-hard cock resting against Herc’s thigh. “ _Dadaí_ ,” he whispers back, spreading his fingers wide over the quiet of Herc’s undead heart, the old amazement, admiration, echoing in his voice again. Sweet as he was his first night. “Father mine.”

“I...” Herc begins, and falters.

But Chuck smiles anyway. Nods. He knows; it lives in their bond, and Herc is endlessly grateful. It will always live in their bond. They’ve never needed those words. Gods willing, they never will.

So Herc kisses him instead. A little rough, on the lips, and Chuck squirms beneath him, laughing with delight.

“Oi, you were gonna get me a present, old man.” Chuck rubs his cheek on Herc’s bare shoulder, nosing the freckles that have never faded. 

“Brought you supper,” Herc says, teasing, “you little ungrateful bastard.”

His boy wriggles, happy. “Naw, was thinking more like that nice little seppo boy you were planning on gifting me?” Chuck smiles in a way that can only be described as winsome. His dimples are adorable. “Can I still have him, daddy?”

“Maybe,” Herc says, and gives Chuck a pointed look, slipping off of him. The boy rolls his eyes, but pours them both a glass of that fine blood. Herc takes the proffered, and lounges against the old iron headboard, taking a whiff of the head. Excellent, this. “ _Dadaí_ was going to show you how to break in a new pet properly. You patient enough for that, Chuck?”

Chuck nods, and drains his own glass in one long gulp. “He already answers to _bitch_ ,” he says, setting it aside again. “What else do I need to teach him?”

“Plenty. But he can wait.” Herc smiles indulgently at the memory of Chuck practically tearing Raleigh to shreds in that hallway, kissing the tip of his nose, biting playfully. “My little hunter. _A laoch_.”

“ _A gaiscíoch,_ ” comes the whispered reply.

For a moment, they just watch each other, his childe’s eyes incredibly soft, brimming with something that neither of them will ever acknowledge with words alone.

“You need more than one glass, childe,” Herc finally murmurs, nodding to the old, chipped carafe. “Another.”

“‘D rather...” he says as he pours another glass, and stops, embarrassment and _rather drink it out of you_ and _no no can’t ask_ flooding the bond.

Herc sighs, but spreads his legs anyway, taking the cup away from Chucks. Sire’s blood is a rare treat, and Herc doesn’t like to spoil his boy, but the little fucker came home. “C’mon then,” he says. “I’m sure I can finish this lot for the both of us.”

Chuck doesn’t say _thank you_ \- he never does - but the bond sings happily as slides down to nip at the inside of Herc’s loins. His fangs tap that sweet little vein and his fingers wrap around Herc’s cock. He runs a nail under the foreskin, the stubble of his cheek rubbing sandpaper-rough against Herc’s balls as he suckles.

Later, Herc supposes, fisting a hand into his son’s sticky-dark hair, sipping at his supper, luxuriating in the closeness, the easy intimacy of it all, he might coax Chuck in to watching the news. Listen to the specials eulogizing Striker Eureka’s command crew; the younger killed in Pitfall, the elder dead by his own hand, walked out into the sea, unable to face the world with his lover.

The humans will say it’s the story of a boy who served loyally, selflessly, at his Ranger’s side for years, who gave everything, his very life, in the service of that Ranger. The story of a man who once saved that boy from certain death and took him as a lover, who risked everything, sacrificed everything, to pull that boy into the conn-pod with him. The story of two men who fought like mad dogs, but could not bear to be apart from each other, even in death. The story of two broken people, coming together to be the best fighting team the PPDC - the world - has ever know.

The humans will say it was for love.

The humans won’t know how far from the truth they are.

How very, very close.

**Author's Note:**

> Gaelic translation time!  
>  _a rúnsearc_ = my secret love  
>  _máistir_ = master  
>  _bábóg_ = baby  
>  _athair, dadaí_ = father, (dad)  
>  _a chuisle mo chroí_ = pulse of my heart  
>  _a ghrá_ = my love  
>  _tá mo chroí istigh ionat_ = my heart is within you  
>  _a stóirín_ = my little darling  
>  _le do thoil_ = please/with your will  
>  _leanbh, mac = child, son_  
>  _mo ghrá thú_ = my beloved  
>  _laoch_ = warrior  
>  _gaiscíoch_ = hero  
> 


End file.
